DEV Community

Reflections on My 15 Year Journey from Novice to Intermediate Developer

Md Abu Taher on December 13, 2022

My self-taught development journey started around 15 years ago when I was a little kid. It went from passion to a job to irritation with tons of up...

Read full post

Corentin Bettiol • Dec 14 '22

Is php obsolete?

While it is true that newer languages such as Python and JavaScript have gained in popularity in recent years, PHP is still widely used and is not considered obsolete.

PHP: Created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf (source)
Python: Guido van Rossum [...] first released [Python] in 1991 (source)

😉

Md Abu Taher • Dec 14 '22

Haha Sorry. I didn’t mean it literally. Will need to change my words.

jrothlander • Dec 21 '22 • Edited

I'm curious why after 15 years you only consider yourself an intermediate programmer. I suspect you have put some thought into this. I like seeing that. One big complaint I have and see often when interviewing people is why they claim the title of senior programmer after as soon as 2 years’ experience.

I like your list of beginner “signs”. My biggest one is "reliance on copying and pasting code from online sources without fully understanding how it works." That's a big one and over my 30 years of writing software, I have run into hundreds of what I call "copy-n-paste" programmers. Many will never move beyond this.

Another one for me is running into someone that has not spent more than 6 months to a year at any one job. You cannot consider yourself a senior level developer if you have never completed a project.

And as a senior you should know how to do binary addition with two's-compliment. Yeah, not really. But it would be nice to see and it would impress me.

Md Abu Taher • Dec 21 '22

I do write my title as a senior programmer in many places like linkedin/github etc, but in reality, there are far more things I have yet to learn, and thus it's intermediate level and not a real senior level.