In an increasingly multi-hat career environment, most PHP Devs are often asked to knock out some front end development from time-to-time. This is not as unusual as you may think. Having learned coding in the home-baked-what-the-hell-are-we-doing-dot-com 1.0 world, we were often expected to do everything from cradle to grave. While duties are a lot more (and rightfully so) siloed between front and back end developers than in 1998, we are still expected to (at least) understand the different life-cycles of web development and design.

One of my past jobs had me maintain a .NET website. Then, coming from a functional PHP job (and a Mac loyalist, to boot), it was an #icebucketchallenge moment – totally breaking me out of my comfort zone. While I never got to the point where I could even jokingly say I was a .NET dev, it taught me many lessons:

1. Humility
2. Understanding of what an over-abstracted OOP system looks like.
3. Appreciation for non-compiled, typeless languages.
4. Microsoft really has a great IDE and support!
5. Why encoding actually matters when PHP is talking to a .NET authentication service.

Either way, being exposed to different environments and languages is a beneficial thing and makes you a much stronger developer.

This month’s issue speaks on this, and explores modern front end development with Aurelio De Rosa’s “A Modern Front End Through the Eyes of a PHP Developer” and Alan Blount’s “MeteorJS – It’s Not PHP But Darn It’s Cool”, as well as Beth’s “Escaping the Comfort Zone”.

Of course, we also touch on our favorite comfy chair, PHP, with Joe Ferguson’s “HTML Form Processing with PHP” and Maarten Balliauw’s “Building a Plugin System with Composer”.

In this month’s Education Station Matthew introduces us to “Pin: An All-In-One Payments System From the Land Down Under”. In this month’s The Confident Coder Aaron Saray asks “What Type Are You?” and Eli White finishes off the August issue with his thoughts on “Agnostic Design”.

One more thing:

This issue is the last issue Beth Tucker Long will be Editor in Chief. Oscar Merida is replacing her in that role. We want to thank Beth for her many years of dedication to the magazine.