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Best PHP Programmers/Developers

Posted: Fri Jul 13, 2007 8:02 pm
by Benjamin
Who are the best programmers who code in PHP? I'm looking for interviews, code and articles written by or about these people. I'm searching around, but not finding much.

Posted: Fri Jul 13, 2007 8:42 pm
by alex.barylski
Are you serious?

Define best?

Typcally those who have made most money or attract most attention are considered "best" which I guess makes sense as those are the only real metrics one can use to judge something as complicated as the art and science of software development.

I've worked for few well known PHP development companies and despite their amazing income I wouldn't call their software anything but mediocre. So perhaps, money and attention/recognition are not the best metrics. :)

Peer review is great, but usually biased in either right or left wing opinions.

Give me a software application that is so simple, within minutes I'm making changes despite having no previous language experience and have the software execute flawlessly and bug free and I will call that developer the "best" of the best.

Chris Shiflett is well known in the PHP community and often offers some serious insight - like his article on mysql injection and why addslashes() is no good. That is something (although not likely to cause troubles) is undeniable and certainly worth knowing.

I think it's hard to pgeon hole any group of developers as the "best" because computer science is so vast and complex. Look at our own members:

1) AC has really helped me in the areas of standards such as XHTML and multiple language support
2) D11 has assisted me tremendously in Linux administration
3) volka and feyd often answer esoteric/out of ordinary technically related questions API's, etc
4) arborint and Maurgim have a fairly solid understanding of patterns theory
5) Everah, Oren and matthijs have assisted me greatly in writing XHTML/CSS layouts

And of course many others, including yourself have assisted me in one way or another.

Some of the most amazing developers I've read articles by were located somewhere in Russia (not sure what it is with those guys but damn they impress me with their abilities sometimes) and are not very well known. On the flipside, you can read articles on SitePoint or DevArticles, etc and have certain names burnt into your head but for no reason other than marketing.

May I ask, why are you conducting this research?

Posted: Fri Jul 13, 2007 8:50 pm
by Benjamin
Hockey wrote:Define best?
Cream of the crop, looked up to, develops new concepts, well known etc...
Hockey wrote:May I ask, why are you conducting this research?
So I can learn some new things.

Posted: Fri Jul 13, 2007 9:28 pm
by stereofrog
That's easy: the best programmers in php are those who coded best php projects. Just google for simpletest, wact, swift, cakephp and you'll find them all. ;)

Posted: Fri Jul 13, 2007 9:35 pm
by Benjamin
stereofrog wrote:That's easy: the best programmers in php are those who coded best php projects. Just google for simpletest, wact, swift, cakephp and you'll find them all. ;)
That's not really what I'm looking for.

Posted: Fri Jul 13, 2007 10:40 pm
by alex.barylski
astions wrote:
stereofrog wrote:That's easy: the best programmers in php are those who coded best php projects. Just google for simpletest, wact, swift, cakephp and you'll find them all. ;)
That's not really what I'm looking for.
Thats what your going to get. :)

Most projects are not *really* innovative but knock offs (and occasional improvements) of an original works; especially in open source (I've researched most open source CMS's and none are really innovative).

You might have to look outside of the realm of PHP for innovatation:

1) Spirit (http://spirit.sourceforge.net/)
2) jQuery (I am not familiar with prototype, etc but coming from a background in dealing with the DOM and it's cross browser madness this really left me impressed).

Those are two projects which come to mind. Spirit builds on existing techniques but it's how you can apply that technique which makes it innovative.

I've spent years researching template engines (Smarty, Savant, Velocity, etc) and there is very little innovation in any of them, just little quirks which make it better suited to one environment over another. String Template (http://www.stringtemplate.org/) author, who is also the author of ANTLR has some interesting articles on the subject, but nothing really earth shattering. The POC I've been working on for the last few years attempts to remove any form of imperative programming from a template and instead uses an advanced pattern recognition algorithm.

Although I have since decided the technique is impractical it is innovative in the sense that an HTML template could be completely edited inside a WYSIWYG editor. Try editing a PHP template inside a WYSIWYG and your PHP source is either ignored or tampered with. If you wanted to change something in the logic of template generation you needed to know PHP. My approach tried tried to predict what the developer/designer intended to do based on the patterns in the template.

Where was I? Oh yea, the point is...those that are well known are seldomly innovative, thats just human nature. They are excellent at marketing themselves whereas innovators are reclusive, awkward and don't like attention, because of fear in having their ideas stolen. :)

I've looked for exactly what you are looking for, and I didnt' find much.

If I could offer some advice:

Discover a problem you frequently encounter, regardless of which technique or solution you use. Sit down and think of a better way of doing it not just technically (saving RAM or resources) but conceptually. When you do discover something, let me before mentioning it to ANYONE. :P

If it's one thing I've learned in life, it's this: Idea's are everything! Although their worth nothing if their never implemented and/or marketed.

I have had that statement re-iterated in my face since I was old enough to attempt to innovate and ask my father for his input. Haha. Crazy old man.

Cheers :)

Posted: Mon Jul 16, 2007 10:56 am
by RobertGonzalez
Are you looking for names?

Matt Mullenweg
Paul M. Jones
Chris Shifflet
Davey Shafik
Jason Sweat
Matt Zandstra

For the most part, these are names of people that are not affiliated with the boards that have ties to some of the more commonly used PHP applications/principles/concepts/books. There are other names that I can speak of, but many of them are higher level programmers that work not just on PHP but on other programs (or even the PHP core).

From the boards, I would tend to go with:
feyd - all things programming
volka - all things PHP
onion2k - GD
arborint/Maugrim - OOP patterns and concepts
arborint/Maugrim/Ninja - Zend framework
Maugrim - security
d11wtq - mail
Ambush Commander - regular expressions/markup
Kieran Huggins/Ninja - jQuery coupled with PHP
pickle - SQL queries coupled with PHP
AKA Panama Jack - templating and ADODB

There are a ton of other developers around here that are very good at PHP development as well (and no offense to you if your name is not listed here).

Posted: Mon Jul 16, 2007 11:45 am
by Jenk
The "Best" can be from any language, as mere trivialities such as which language we use bears little meaning on "advanced" topics.

N.B. Words within quotations are very subjective.

Posted: Mon Jul 16, 2007 11:51 am
by infolock
Everah wrote:There are a ton of other developers around here that are very good at PHP development as well (and no offense to you if your name is not listed here).
:banghead:

Posted: Mon Jul 16, 2007 1:06 pm
by d3ad1ysp0rk
infolock wrote:
Everah wrote:There are a ton of other developers around here that are very good at PHP development as well (and no offense to you if your name is not listed here).
:banghead:
Pwned.


..wait..

damn.

:lol: