Webstrong Ltd

This is the first post by Webstrong’s web designer, Philip Brant. Philip has come from a background in website design and recently went on a 14 week introduction course to PHP and Smarty, two of the core technologies we use here at Webstrong. This post gives Philip’s views on the course and it’s benefits.

Greetings all, this is a brief rundown of the course I underwent from February-May of this year.

First off, some background…

August last year I landed a job at Webstrong, plucked from obscurity by Iarfhlaith. The first employee of an up and coming startup, things were looking great. “I’ve made it I thought, I’m a success”, what a great job I now have! Off to town I went and immediately invested in a top hat and monocle to accompany my new found position. This delusion wasn’t to last long however.

Now there was a bit more to it than this, but to sum it up this is roughly how it went. Upon my first couple of days at Webstrong, I quickly realised “yeah it’s great I can build websites, but look what else is possible”, “my god” I thought, “I must be trained in the arts of programming to truly achieve Nirvana in this industry”. It was like having your wardrobe door opened and seeing “Alice in Wonderland”. With that in mind, off I went back to the classroom, dreams of grandeur shelved until I master these new skills that have been brought to my attention.

Fast forward to February 2009

My journey began on a frosty February evening in iBat, Swords. “PHP and MySQL” 14 week course, we were also treated to some Smarty, jQuery (write less, do more, all hail mighty jQuery) and even a small bit on Joomla, the juggernaut CMS.

It was a small enough class, with people from all sorts of different backgrounds. Our lecturer was a Zend qualified PHP expert, so we had all the right ingredients to get going.

Starting on the first night we got PHP up and running on our machines, for this we installed WAMP Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP), I was hoping we would go through the hardcore installation of PHP but as were pressed for time with so much to get through, I understand the need for speed. For anybody starting out, WAMP is a godsend and I’d recommend it to get the ball rolling.

Now that we had it up and running on our machines and after the industry standard “hello world”, we were ready to get down to business. The first few weeks were all functions, arrays and variables, without these nothing would get done so it is of vital importance these are understood well. At first they can be quite confusing, but after writing them out a couple of hundred times, the formatting quickly becomes second nature to you and you get the “parse errors” out of your system. With this under our belt we then started putting it all into practice

• passing information through forms
• writing login scripts
• connecting to a database
• populating tables with information
• eCommerce section
• sessions
• starting out your own CMS
• integrating PayPal with our shopping cart

From about halfway through until the end we started using Smarty for all our work. Although it’s a big step to take so soon I think it’s definitely worth while, our lecturer highly recommended it and it’s what we use at Webstrong. It was one of the things that most impressed me when I started at Webstrong, seeing the size of some of our projects, yet the code is so tidy and easy to read, a neat freaks dream.

So what will the course give you?

If you’re serious about becoming a programmer, I’d definitely recommend a course like this. You may not be a programming expert at the end of it, it will however give you a solid foundation from which to build on. It will guide you in the right direction, set you on your way.

The rest is up to you and how badly you want it. For me, it’s a great advantage that I get to work with it everyday. With a lot of hard work, practice and zero ego, you’ll get there. Write the code, make your mistakes and learn from them. With each project under your belt you become a stronger, all round better developer until one day you can take the top hat off the shelf and say “I’ve made it, I’m a success”.

I’d like to thank our lecturer for the past 14 weeks for always making the classes interesting and enjoyable and I wish everyone who was in my class all the best in your future endeavours.