Is PHP dead?

In my search for a new job I recently spoke to a recruitment agent that asked me if I had used php. My answer was ‘yes, but not for a long time’. We moved on to Laravel, which I’d kind of poked about with but never really got into it.

The recruitment agent went on to suggest that there’s a big shortage of php developers at the moment and companies are willing to recruit those with less than ideal experience as long as they’ve got some basics and a willingness to level-up on the missing knowledge. I got a little excited to be honest.

We ended the call with a challenge; go away, build something, call me back early next week and we can discuss it and see if I can put you forward for any roles in my portfolio.

My php background

I first used php 20+ years ago. I ran a forum on my University user account, back then, certainly as a student in the Computing faculty, we basically had websace just as you might get from an ISP at the time. It was up to you how you used it as long as it wasn’t used for an illegal purpose. The only donwside was that this space was only available to users within the university network, essentially an intranet.

Initially I found a php based forum and deployed it, there was nothing unusual about this, I think most students in the Computing faculty had something similar, usually for complaining about lecturers or for sharing details about a hobby etc. As a result, there were many forums that all looked very similar.

The forum included an admin interface allowing for some simple branding, a few colour choices and maybe a few other light-touch things. The only challenge, if any, was getting the forum deployed into your user account in the first place, not a difficult challenge, but from memory, it was more work to get it up and running than it was to give it some basic customisation.

Looking under the hood

It was only a desire to have finer control over branding and some of the things that I wanted to be displayed in the user profiles section, that led me to look more closely at the php files.

At the time I would have been learning Java as part of my university course, and whilst not a fan, it certainly looked nicer and was easier to understand than the mess I saw in those php files.

It wasn’t Software Engineering

The changes I made were not Engineered or Developed, I just tackled it like all things; pick at it, move things, delete things, see what changes, make a mental note and slowly build up knowledge of the product through trial and error.

The Community

One of the things that people spoke about in my forum at the time was Linux and what seemed like a constant struggle to make it work with various bits of computer hardware, especially with what would have been the early wireless network cards at the time.

I found an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) and decided I’d like to expand on this Linux content but open it to the public, it couldn’t just be university students that were struggling, and indeed, maybe the wider world offered easier access to the answers we sought as a community.

I bought a domain name, LinuxJourney.com, and set about deploying the CMS to the free space I had from my ISP at the time, intially this was fine, but quite quickly I found I was hitting performance issues. It wasn’t so much that I had vast amounts of traffic, it was just that the ISP at the time was relatively small and they just didn’t really cut it in the hosting departmet.

Eventually I took my growing community site to a big hosting company based in the UK. The package was really cheap at the time, something like £30 for a years hosting with more than enough hosting space and a bandwidth limit that was far above the volume of traffic I ws generating at the time.

Under another hood

Again I found myself digging about under the hood, making my version of the CMS different from anyone elses, adding extra features, even building my own modules. It wasn’t software engineering, it was try, try and try again, until something stuck.

The demise of the community

Something new turned up, a little thing called FaceBook and forums have been on decline ever since. I tried to make the forum a less important part of the site, focusing more on long-form posts, again this meant more modification of the underlying php and some new modules.

Traffic continued to wilt away and my real job, at the time, was taking more of my energy, so at some point I stopped fighting for the traffic and didn’t renew the domain name.

That domain was since procured by someone else that continues to write about the topic, though to a far higher standard than I did at the time. I’m glad to see it still exists, even if it has nothing to do with me, any of my orginal content or code.

The gap

I stopped trying to be a web developer, I went into what was a pretty exciting period in my career and any coding I was doing at the time was limited to Python and Shell scripting, usually only to help speed things up like automaiting the updating of lots of network devices with some new code, maybe a new nagios server IP address or so.

Spring forward and into Laravel 10

Running back from memory lane and to my experiences with Laravel…

It may be that I’d already fought my way through reading a php file or it may be that php has come a long way, or that laravel is just a really nice framework, or perhaps a combination of the three, but I came away feeling that I really like php.

Coming up with an idea

Thinking what I might build always seems to take me some time. I eventually settled on building a fairly simple portfolio page, I felt it was a good place to explore Laravel and php as well as a way of showcasing previous exposure to php. The page has a few extra features, not needed for a portfolio page, but things I could talk about at the follow-up phone call or even better, with a potential future employer, such as search functionality, user authentication, form validation and a SQLite database.

Granted, the frontend isn’t the prettiest, but I don’t look for roles where UI/UX is a key skill, I know I am lacking in that space.

I really like php/laravel

I quickly realised how much I liked working with php, especially with the laravel framework, I amazed myself at how quick I could develop something, the skeleton of a site was in place in less time than it took me to think of an idea in the first place.

I started looking at X for posts and posters discussing php. The title for this article was inspired by what I found. Yes, there are many php proponents, but there are a lot of haters as well.

Inspiration meets Reality

I was so inspired by my php journey that before I’d even finished the portfolio page, I had ideas for what I wanted to build next. That second project is currently confined to a docker container on my laptop.

Hosting sucks!

Until php burst back into my life, my recent coding has been in things like HTML/CSS/JS, React, Vite (oh and I can’t stop playing with Flutter as well).

I’ve gotten used to things like Netlify and the ability to very quickly push out a new site or portfolio piece with very little work (beyond the coding) for me.

php doesn’t seem to have any options where we can quickly (and for free) push out a new piece of work for the world to review.

I found lots of really good paid for hosting packages, and if the product had a chance to turn a penny, that’s completely fine, but if it doesn’t, then why pay for hosting it when there are really good free options out there?

I ended up paying (a very small sum) for hosting with Heliohost. It does work but it is exceptionally slow. As such, that second project I built, remains parked for now. In fact, I enjoyed building the project so much that I am currently rebuilding it using Vite and React, so I might have more to say on that in a future post.

What came from the chat with the recruitment agent?

The chat with the agent has not lead to a new job, at least not yet. I called them back, they took a glance at my site, asked me some questions, mostly how I found it using laravel, which I could only speak fondly of, before telling me they’ll see what’s on the books and get back to me.

php Jobs

I learned that I like working with php and especially with laravel so I started looking for roles that seek those skills and there are actually quite a lot of them, even more than for something like React (at least in my area) so the experience has been positive in that I suddenly have a larger pool of jobs to pursue.

Is PHP Dead?

Absolutely not!

I thoroughly enjoyed coding in it recently and I’ve seen a lot of jobs out there looking for php developers, further to this, the community on X has just as many php fans as it does haters. php is going to be around for a few years yet and I personally have no problem with that.