Putting on the PHP Floaties.
As stated in the post about moving to Statamic, I’ve been diving into learning PHP via Laracasts. After years of scraping the surface of PHP, mostly via WordPress, I've decided to throw myself in the deep end. Hope someone is around to throw me a life preserver!
I’ve been going through the PHP for Beginners course to start, because I’d like to look at the code and have at least some idea of what’s going on. Get a good foundation as it were, because to be completely honest, I imagine I’ll rely a lot on AI when beginning to code the website I have in mind (a community-based site dedicated to all forms of electronic music). PHPStorm, the IDE I’m using to work through the tutorials, has an AI Assistant baked in that I might subscribe to. And work has us all using Github’s Copilot plugin in VS Code. Whether you like it or not, AI is here to stay it seems. Might as well get used to working with it.
(as an aside, I’ve had people who don’t work in the computer industry ask if I’m worried about AI taking over my job. And to be honest, yes… and no. I was on a Slack call with a backend Angular dev trying to work through an issue, and he suggest we use Copilot and ask the AI for help. He mentioned that he sometimes has a hard time getting Copilot to understand what he wants and it can take 3 or 4 times before Copilot gives an answer close to what he needs. While he was talking about this, I wrote out what I needed, and boom, I had the exact answer and code we were looking for. So, yes, AI can be worrisome, but a user will still need to know what to ask for. I feel like I’m good at explaining what the desired outcome I’m looking for is (mostly) and can get the AI to do what I need)
Once I’ve completed the PHP Beginner course, I plan on taking the “30 Days to Learn Laravel” course. Laravel is the PHP Frame work I plan on utilizing when building my site. Why? Again, why not?
If nothing else it’s always good to learn something new. Beats reloading Reddit for the umpteenth time this evening.