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Filip Iulian Pacurar
Filip Iulian Pacurar

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PHP, CodeIgniter, Laravel, Vue, React, front-end… or how I changed my stack over the course of time

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Back in 2012 when I got my first programming job right after I graduated high school, I did not have any experience with PHP frameworks, I’ve mainly used plain old PHP for my freelance websites and the only thing closer to a framework back then was WordPress. I was quite good with WordPress but it was far behind what a framework means.

So when I started the job, I had a few months of paid time to actually start learning CodeIgniter. It was the hot thing in the PHP world back then. CI was ok, introduced me to a couple of OOP things but it was all over the place, not really well structured, and did not follow the best practices.

In the same period, I discovered Laravel 4, around 2013 in the autumn. My initial thought about it was “eww, I don’t like it, it is trying to rewrite how PHP works, what’s up with all those View::make and Route::get calls, why is everything different than standard PHP. So I did not spend any time learning it right away. I even thought I need to install a separate PHP extension to run it, which was not the case.

Anyway so, we had an internal project at the company I was back then called Tag Economy, an online app written in CodeIgniter over the course of 2012-2013. It was mainly an app for tracking personal spending habits, grouping payments by tags and you could see a lot of graphs based on the entries. The app was working but it was mainly used just by us working at the company and a few friends.

Read the rest of the article on my personal blog :)

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