JS → PHP

Just setting up my $5 VPS on Digital Ocean droplet.

PHP, SQLite, here I come!

Not gonna lie, it’s still scary venturing into unfamiliar territory. I’m a JavaScript dev. Cut my teeth on Vue.js, then Nuxt.js. Mostly avoided wrangling with backend by using headless CMS Strapi, which is similar to Node.js but with more abstraction and scaffolding. Deployed that with PostgreSQL on Heroku, so I didn’t need to think much about dev ops. My coding journey so far is one focused on offloading everything to frontend as much as I can.

I tried to avoid having to do anything backend for the longest time, but there comes a time when I can’t avoid it no longer, if I want to progress on my goals of shipping fast and building long-lasting apps. I wasted so much time searching for a solution, which on hindsight, now feels like procrastination.

Getting into PHP and backend is scary yes, but I think I know how to manage that fear by now. Something I learned from the past few years of not knowing how to do something, but just figuring out anyway. Everything is figureoutable. Yes it’s unfamiliar territory but not uncharted. PHP and SQLite had been around for ages, and there’s lots of communities and resources online that can help. AI makes a huge difference now.

So I’ll be in good hands.