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chevron_rightEven after 25 years of experience in web development, I still see it as THE ultimate tool to reach almost everyone. With all the modern CSS innovations, it's also becoming more and more fun to bring to life any design that designers may come up with.
Apart from that, I'm also always discovering new purposes for PHP - the language is definitely not just limited to the web and thus has significantly more potential than many realize.
Do I let something like lunch breaks, closing time, holidays, or weekends stop me from just programming anyway? Absolutely not. Do I expect anything in return? Not even that. I'm a programmer by passion, and it will stay that way for (at least) a lifetime.
For 25 years I've been putting boxes within boxes within boxes - that's the concept behind HTML structures - and teaching myself all the elements and attributes by self-study.
Ever since HTML5, there have been many useful new HTML elements that you simply can't do without these days - for example, video elements that rely on a video player built into the browser.
Consequently, I use these possibilities to any extent in order to develop designs and websites according to client's wishes.
I have been using CSS virtually since the beginning. But it was only around 2012 that browsers slowly started to support modern concepts.
Flexbox and CSS-Grid alone open up an extremely wide range of possibilities - but I try to make use of the full potential of CSS as much as possible.
For a long time I avoided JavaScript because there were too many security issues with it and thus many people just completely blocked it.
For about 10 years now I've been actively using JavaScript in conjunction with jQuery to make websites interactive and significantly reduce their footprint.
jQuery simplifies a lot in JavaScript - you can achieve so much with so little code.
But I use it primarily because it improves compatibility between browsers by having jQuery resort to fallbacks for browsers that don't yet support a particular feature. This sets jQuery apart from all other JavaScript frameworks in my opinion.
For 24 years I've been using PHP to build web applications - back then, many software products didn't exist, so you simply had to rely on developing web software yourself.
I've been using my own framework, which has been in development for about 21 years now, and it's primarily designed for highest possible security and optimal footprint.
For me, functional programming has been the way to go ever since, as there are only very few situations where object-oriented programming and classes would be the better choice in my opinion. In the year 2023 I also developed a highly flexible event system, which, when compared to classes, offers better modular extensibility and encapsulation/scoping. So I guess I ended up with event-oriented functional programming (EOFP?).
Nowadays I use PHP for a variety of things:
- Server-side data processing that runs in the background and uses multithreading/processforking.
- To control other server processes, as far as they provide APIs for that
- Server-side services/processes that are continuously active long-term
- Creating and processing backups on other servers
- For automatic background updates of web software
- To calculate my age :o)
- And, of course, for websites
- Oh yes... and to calculate all the year counts here within the Vita
Databases should be part of any project containing dynamic data or user content. For about 20 years I've been using MySQL databases in conjunction with PHP projects.
The optimization of tables plays one of the biggest roles here: reasonable indexes must be created so that database access can scale, meaning that they maintain their high access speeds regardless of the amount of data present.
Nowadays, Debian Linux comes with the MySQL fork "MariaDB", whose table type "Aria" provides another significant performance increase for SQL queries.
For about 12 years I've increasingly been developing websites or their features in an API-based way, which reduces their footprint quite significantly.
APIs (interfaces) play a very important role especially for companies that want to link their products with the products of other companies.
With that in mind, after years of benchmarking, I've found the best API solutions performance-wise so far and use them at every opportunity.
Something unknown to many non-programmers: API development can be done VERY quickly, provided that you can communicate with the developers on the other side directly and without detours.
For around 18 years I have been using Debian Linux when it comes to server operating systems. It has proven to be exceptionally stable and flexible.
For 15 years now I have been involved with recording and editing videos.
This also includes conceptualization, scripting, and high-quality audio recordings to, for example, create tutorial videos to client specifications.
For 29 years, the improvement and modification of audio data (speech, instruments, music, etc.) is simply part of my life.
Quite often recordings have some noise that can actually be filtered out very easily and without leaving any residue - though many people just don't do that. But there are generally a lot of ways you can post-process audio to make it sound better. I try to make use of these possibilities as much as possible.