First day jitters in PHP

Deep in PHP land, I’m scared now.

Don’t get me wrong though… it’s not that it’s difficult learning PHP. Between Youtube, ChatGPT, Stackoverflow and blog posts, I can find the answers I need. I manage to debug most issues, can get things working, all thanks to how long PHP had been around.

It’s just… everything feels foreign. Like first day jitters in a new school. Or new country. And sometimes you second-guess your decision to go there, look over your shoulder often thinking about home, and wonder if you should have stuck to what was familiar.

“I could have just shipped by now using Nuxt, Strapi and Heroku.” would replay in my head.

But I remind myself the reason I’m in PHP land in the first place – exactly because I wasn’t happy just shipping something fast using what I was familiar with, and dealing with the downstream tech debt and maintenance effort required of JavaScript frameworks. It’s easy to get seduced into immediate gratification, harder to stick to learning something new for longer term payoffs.

But we all know this fear passes. Fast. First day becomes first week, first month. The unfamiliar becomes familiar, incompetence to competency.

This too shall pass.

I think I’ll fear it a lot less once I build live, working apps and push them out into the wild. Rinse and repeat a few times, and I’ll be able to ship fast too. If I keep up my current learning pace, by next week or week after, I’ll be in a more solid position.

Onwards! 💪