Where to go from here?

Haddman

I've been programming for about 3 years now and i've found myself hitting a stand still, i've mastered the "if" and "while" statements in PHP.

The other day i threw together a pretty descent forum wich took me about 5 hours and i needed to find one little function "nl2br()" so i decided to download the source for phpbb forum to try and find it, i opened a file and it was like i was reading chinese, after i finished the forum i browsed the internet for advanced tutorials, but without luck, maybe i didn't search hard enough but i really wanna learn more, lots more, but i don't really know where to go from here.

I've also been looking through the General Help, Newbies and Coding categories to see if i can answer some questions and i was finding questions being posted by "newbs"(stated by themselves) where sometimes i can barely understande the code.

Any suggestions on where i can go from here are very appreciated🙂

rulian

nl2br is a naitive function built into PHP that is why you couldnt find it in the phpbb files.
I wouldnt be surprised if the code was actually chinese I did once have to troubleshoot a website coded in German that was a lot of fun.

If you want to brush up on your code you can simply take on challenges that you havent attempted before, this will force you to learn new things and think of things differently.

Understand that before the programmer ever writes any code, medium to big size jobs are made or killed in the planning stages so that is what I think is the mark of a quality programmer, its about not just knowing the syntax but planning for the program to adapt and grow and fail believe it or not.

PHP is a very good language to start out with because its very flexible and highly tolerable to mistakes. However that's also the reason alot of people pick up bad habits or sometimes dont grow as a developer because they become accustomed to what they have done.

Alot of open source projects are done modular in Object Oriented Programming. If you are unfamilar with it, it may be a good starting point to expand outwards.

And thank you for commenting on my portfolio

Weedpacket

What have you been doing for the past three years? What experience do you have to draw on?

mpb001

nl2br is such a good name. I don't really like shortening things to abreviations( abbreviations were very poluar in c before IDEs) but it does sound like a pop band with break dancing aesthetics.

"A lot of open source projects are done modular in Object Oriented Programming. "

That is nor really that accurate. Modern ones yes. But major legacy ones such as Drupal and Wordpress are not. When I last looked at PhpMyAdmin that was not either. Though when it comes to code quality Drupal has a lot more love from developers even though it is firmly procedural rooted. I have never really looked at the code but I did the other two.

Any code will cause questioning.
http://www.osnews.com/story/19266/WTFs_m

The question always is am I crying because of my ineptitude or someone elses.

Haddman

Weedpacket;10924341 wrote:
What have you been doing for the past three years? What experience do you have to draw on?

You could drop that down to 2 years, 3 years since i started but there have been long periods of time that i haven't had access to a computer or been playing EVE Online.

For those 2 years i've mainly been working on browser based games, haven't published anything, they've all been pretty simple so far but haven't finished one of them to the degree that i'm happy with it.

The only thing that has grown tremendously is the way i use what i know but i haven't learned anything new.

Maybe i'm just speaking nonsense, i don't know but i feel like there is so much more i could learn when f.x. i look through the phpbb code but i'm not sure where to go from here, maybe it's because i've only been taking on pretty simple tasks (i did create a pretty good pm system wich took me days to figure out and the first time i tried my hands on making a forum wich was about 6 months ago i failed horribly, now it took me 3 hours+2 hours to find one little error + 10+ to add edit functions and delete functions and more minor things) so far.

amy_damnit

Where do you want to go?

Cancun? Become a mother of 5? Lose 20 lbs? Become a better dancer?

What are your goals? Objectives?

Scanning your post, it seemed very vague...

Based on limited info, and assuming you mean from a career standpoint...

1.) Learn Design

2.) Learn OOP (and OOA and OOD)

3.) Learn everything you can about Business

4.) Do something to differentiate yourself (e.g. MBA, PMP, Leadership SKills, Speaking Skills)

If all you know how to do is "hack out code" then life is pretty limited.

Learn how to interact with people and solve people's problems - using code - and you will go far...

Amy