I'm specialised at performance and reliability optimisation, security hardening, and debugging. Got experience taking projects from prototype and MVP to full products and services. Can take over and finish abandoned projects. Task and process automation is a pure joy to me. So is data scraping.
I'm specialised at performance and reliability optimisation, security hardening, and debugging. Got experience taking projects from prototype and MVP to full products and services. Can take over and finish abandoned projects. Task and process automation is a pure joy to me. So is data scraping.
I'm specialised at performance and reliability optimisation, security hardening, and debugging. Got experience taking projects from prototype and MVP to full products and services. Can take over and finish abandoned projects. Task and process automation is a pure joy to me. So is data scraping.
PHP is not going away anytime soon. The only downside, it has no use beyond web. If you're new to programming, no. Better focus on Python, Node, Go, Java, or even JavaScript. There's still a strong and in certain niches growing demand for PHP, but definitely not suitable for a beginner, as lots of that work involves maintaining and / or upgrading legacy code.
I consider "no major uses beyond web" to be a strength. Whereas other languages were adapted into use for HTTP servers, PHP was a tool for HTML rendering from the ground up, and therefore a specialist. I tend to trust specialists overall when it comes to tools, wouldn't you agree?
I see where you are coming from, but I have a built a few big XML processing tools in PHP that run quite happily on the command line. Having said that, it was a few years back, and I tend to reach for Python for text/XML processing these days...
Maintaining and upgrading legacy code is good work for a beginner. Plenty of work, and beginners can learn more from a working application than trying to write something ground-up when they aren’t prepared to make the design decisions.
You got plenty of choices, luckily. None being escapist neither implying you having to back down as some of the answers here imply, though there were some valuable advices you were given. All choices and solutions basically revolve around not working at a corporation. Join a small company, go contracting / freelancing. They do imply short term discomfort, bear a certain level of risk, yet they yield great dividends.
