Motivated by Rober Martin’s article, Hoards Of Novices, I’ve decided to write an article on a similar subject.

I do not want to write about the need for employers to hire juniors, but about why these juniors are not up to the expectations and, in the end, what can be done to be better prepared.

The software market is continuously expanding. Software is the way we command a computer what to do. Today, devices around us have processors, software and applications, from phones, watches, TVs and up to washing machines and refrigerators. All these devices need programms and programmers to develop applications for them.

With this premises, we reach the Software crisis. It was concluded that we need to build software faster in order to solve this crisis. This was a popular subject in the ’60s, but in time it has become less important.

To solve this problem, high level languages and frameworks were built. High level languages made development and maintenance of an application much easier. This way, programmers are getting very far from the “metal” of the actual hardware, working with concepts much easier to deal with.

In a world of high level languages (Java, C#, PHP, Python, JavaScript etc.) it is much easier and faster to create an application.

Yet, although developing an application is becoming easier, the quality of the developers is falling.

A consumer society

We need school for a better job.

Because the need for studies is a general need, the school itself is diluting. The educational principles haven’t had significant changes since education became available to everybody. The result of the learning process is the exam, in order to determine the level of knowledge. And even more, a mediocre result allows us to move forward, without prove that the required base is present.

Moving to the next level is done with a partial evaluation, you don’t have to know 100% of the information, just 50-60%. It is not exactly clear if there are important notions in the remaining 40-50%.

This educational problem is more or less a general problem and there are few those who try different approaches.

In general, I don’t consider school a defining system for determining the knowledge, especially today, when we have access to such a large volume of alternatives for it.

When students finish school, they don’t have all the required knowledge to actually work in the industry, which is not abnormal. School must offer a general basis. For instance, during my higher education I can remember at least 8-9 programming languages that we studied. There were actually more, but I didn’t keep a detailed evidence of them. It is clear that you can’t possibly know all these programming languages in order to become productive using them. On the other hand, you have an idea on how to approach them, which may help you to find the one you’ll like to study in thoroughness.

That’s the key, to study in thoroughness! For this we each have our approach, here you can find your own way, either courses, books, practical projects or all of them. By thoroughly studying a subject, the employers will not only accept you, but they will hunt you!

Often, the passion will totally replace the studies from school. I’ve met a lot of people which, even though they haven’t studied informatics in school, they are now professionals in it.

The good part is that a lot of people are studying from pleasure and I advise anyone who is reading these lines to search for pleasure in what they do. This is the best motivation.

Alternative education in a consumer society

Because the traditional learning techniques are no exactly sufficient, let’s talk about a few alternative methods:

• books
• courses
• tutorials
• articles/blogs

Books

Traditionally books are the best source of information (at least until the Internet became available). But there is no guaranty for the quality!

About 8-9 years ago I was trying to buy a JavaScript book. The selection wasn’t very big and so I tried to analyze each one.

In the end I was disappointed with my choice, because instead of teaching me JavaScript, the book was teaching how to make special effects on the page (very popular in that period).

In my particular case, I found the answer much later in a presentation by Douglas Crockford. He said that most JavaScript books are like that and he was recommending a single book, beside the book written by him, JavaScript: The Definitive Guide.

The reason is very simple, people tend to be more drawn by books that promise to teach a language or technology in a limited number of lessons or days. We want everything now, but studying takes time, you must understand the notions, not just a fast overview.

Generally, to determine the quality of a book you should look for reviews. These days it is very easy, I prefer Amazon.com and not only. This way you can determine if it is what you are looking for.

Sometimes a faster approach is useful, especially if you don’t have any previous experience on the subject, but generally this doesn’t offer a general perspective, only a gentile introduction.

Courses

There are a lot of courses, both in-class and on-line. Just like for the books, it is hard to determine the quality of the course.

Courses promise a lot, but a lot of the times they don’t treat the subjects in detail and in the end, even though you have the impression that you have learned a lot, when it comes to practice you realize that any variation from the course material is very difficult.

Just like for books, references are very important! Unfortunately, there aren’t as many reviews for course as there are for books.

Try to see what subjects the course is teaching and the detail of the approach. Sometimes, you can find more easily a reference for the teacher than for the course.

Tutorials

Especially on the Internet, there are a lot of tutorials that promise to teach a certain domain, but they only teach you how to create their example. In the end you can only create small variations of the initial example. Often, the creator of the tutorial has the best intentions, but it is hard to transfer information like this.

For the free ones it is very easy to determine if the approach is the right one for you and for your needs. Try to watch a few episodes and in the end see how much you’ve understood on how that particular component is working. If you can only replicate, maybe you need to search a little more.

The good part is that there are generally a lot of them to choose from. For instance, for a programming language you can first check the official reference to see what you should learn about, then in the tutorial you can see how many of the points from the reference were approached.

For the commercial ones it is a bit harder, because often you just have a small introspective preview, insufficient to form an opinion. For those particular cases you should search for reviews.

Blogs and articles

The good part here is that the time investment is relatively small. It is simpler to get a general idea.

The disadvantage is that some of the articles don’t update with time. You must make sure that the examples work on the version that you are using. From my own experience I can say that keeping an article up to date is hard an takes a lot of time. For instance some of the articles on this blog that still attract visitors are written a few years back and if I don’t use that particular technology anymore, I’m tempted not to keep them up to date.

How to learn better

Search for references and reviews for the materials that will require an investment in time and/or money: books, courses or tutorials.

When you’ve settled on a subject, try to see what materials others recommend. The Internet is full of materials of different levels of difficulty.

When you fell that you’ve mastered a subject, test your knowledge. Build an app, follow the subject on Q/A platforms or even write a tutorial for the others. You tend to understand much better a subject when you have to describe it to others.

Practice! It is very important to practice what you learn or you’ll forget much easier than you think. Contribute to open-source projects, try to do personal projects or try to adapt projects created by somebody else to your needs. Github is a very good tool for finding and publishing projects.

It is a bit harder at the beginning to understand somebody else’s code, but in the industry it is mandatory in order to be able to collaborate with others.

Learn new things all the time. Technology is changing, and so is the perspective over it. For instance, AJAX appeared in the late “90’s, but the perspective over it and how it can be used changed dramatically over the next few years, even though the technology itself didn’t change a lot during that time. The same for JavaScript, even though it appeared in the “90’s, only after 2000 it began to be considered an useful tool, previously it was mainly used for special effects on the page.

For a while, PHP was considered useful only for small projects. Today it is the language of choice for giants of the internet, like Facebook and Yahoo!. Along with the popularity, the best practices on the language itself changed for a better scalability and performance.

Conclusion

The educational system doesn’t offer the performance that employers are looking for. This creates a discrepancy between the expectations of the employers and those of the graduates, and this not restricted to informatics.

Unfortunately, the alternative materials sometimes also promise unrealistic things. Some study technologies and programming languages for months, while others promise results after only days or even hours.

Fortunately, we are living in an era dominated by information, and we can find not only materials, but also opinions about them.

Through better training, the changes of finding a job are rising considerably, resulting in satisfaction on both sides.

Another year has passed without native unicode support for PHP. Yes, PHP6 is not here yet, in case anybody was still asking…

But, the version that is now here is PHP 5.4. With this version only refinements were added, there weren’t changes as big as there were on PHP 5.3. In PHP 5.4, the big addition are “traits” and, my favorite, the new version for closure.

As the keywords for last year were Drupal and Magento, this year the keyword was only Magento.

A couple of months ago, more or less forced by the circumstances, I’ve taken the Magento Plus certification exam. For this certification, Optaros, my employer, had a major influence. We had been more or less made to take the exam and we also had to be part of a company level study group.

I haven’t been part of a study group since faculty, and I must admit that I’ve forgotten how useful it is. Colleagues with more Magento experience (unlike me who I’ve been working with Magento for a little more than an year), had helped a lot to clarify issues and to document them.

But more about this in another blog, that will follow shortly (I hope)…

Anyway, after studying Magento in so much detail, I must admit that I have a lot more respect for the platform. After you analyze the backend architecture, a different picture is emerging. The architecture is very interesting and quite flexible, which makes you overlook some of it’s shortcomings.

Now that a new year has begun, I wish I’m going to publish more, I think in the last period I haven’t been very “productive” when it comes to publishing, either text or code.

Also this year I want to take at least another certification exam. As the Magento certification was set only for this year, I still have a lot of options on my plate.

That’s about all for 2012 and plans for 2013.

I wish you an excellent 2013!

This is a small project for Microsoft Windows users!

It is a Text To Speech utility written in HTML and JavaScript. The application runs as a HTML Application.

I’ve written this application 3 times already, because I lost the first couple of versions. Finally I thought that maybe others can benefit from it.

For the Linux users one alternative is: eSpeak.

More details on the project page.

My elePHPants collection has just doubled, now I have 2!

I wanted an pink elePHPant, to keep company to my old elePHPant.

Also this time I’ve turned to eBay. A quick search found another elePHPants breeder, this time is: Herman J. Radtke III. This time I’ve ordered it directly from his site, without eBay, only because eBay would calculate the shipping fee wrong.

Even with the right shipping fee, the new elePHPant wasn’t exactly cheap:

	$	RON
ElePHPant	16.16	55,51
Shipping to RO	16.95	58,23
Postal fee (customs)	0.6	1.95
Total:	33.71	115,69

Not exactly cheap taking into consideration that the price for an elePHPant is about 5 euros in bulk.

But now I have a happy elePHPant family!

It became a tradition for me to begin my annual review on this subject.

PHP 6 is as close to be released as it was last year, or two years ago, which is without perspective. This year PHP 5.4 reached RC4 and a final version will probably be released soon, this means that work on PHP 6 will not be resumed soon. But more about PHP 5.4 with another occasion, is on my “TODO” list to see what got into RC4.

As the main keyword for me in PHP 5.3 were namespaces, Anonymous functions, closures and garbage collector, in PHP 5.4 it seems that those keywords are going to be traits, the new closures and scalar type hinting, next to many other new features.

When I’ve wrote my first annual review blog about PHP 6, I was mainly working on Romanian websites, hence my desire for a version that will natively support this language and any other without any changes. Back then I was mainly working directly with the language, without using a framework most of the time. But since then a lot of time has passed and many things have changed, now I’m using almost exclusively frameworks and other platforms that are taking me further away from the language, offering me a different architectural perspective.

After more then an year with NCH, I’ve decided that is time for a change. This is also a company from the states with a branch in Romania, and this time is Optaros. Although I wasn’t trying to change my work place, I’ve responded to an invitation to an interview, and long story short, I left. For a long time I’ve wanted to work again for external clients, after working at NCH where all the projects were internal, I’ve wanted a change.

Again the projects are even bigger, with other scalability issues. But I think that makes web development so interesting, the bigger the scalability issues, the bigger the project.

Last year the main keywords were Linux si Symfony framework. For this year that is just ending the main keywords probably were: Magento and Drupal.

After a short period of working with Magento, I can say that it seems incredible how a platform so big has so little documentation and a lot of the time so inconsistent. It is a very complex platform and a lot of things can be done with it, but when it comes to documentation, it seems like the usual approach is to just analyze the core. Coming from the Symfony world, where there are literary books for documentation, available for free, it seems incredible how little and disorganized is the Magento documentation. But this is also a subject for another blog. A think that the Optaros team played an important role in helping me understand how to approach the issues.

Another major event for me this year was the Yahoo! Open Hack Day, event that this year was also held in Romania. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much enthusiasm and energy in a single place, in a single day. For me as a developer it was an unforgettable experience, one of those moments that remind me why I’ve chosen this profession.

Also this year I’ve passed my PHP 5.3 certification exam, at the beginning of the year. The exam wasn’t as difficult as I’ve expected, even though the tension remains the same. The fact that it wasn’t my first certification exam helped, it’s incredible how much you remember when you start the reading the documentation again. Last year I’ve decided that I have to take at least an certification exam every year, so I have to get started on preparing for the next one.

As a conclusion, 2011 was a good year, full of challenges and accomplishments, even though I haven’t checked a lot of entries on my last year’s resolution, I’ve done quite a few that were not on that list. But now is time for another new year’s resolution.

And now I wish you an 2012 full of achievements! Happy new year!