GaryClarkeTech

  Today I bring good news! I’ve compiled the first 12 videos from my forthcoming PHP Framework Pro course into one 70 minute video. The lessons included in this preview are: The Front Controller Autoloading Request Class Response Class Http Kernel Routing FastRoute Router Adding Routes Retrieving Path Info Defining Routes Controller Classes Controller Method Arguments This is just a small sample of the full course which will be released in March and many of the components will grow and evolve as the course progresses. This week I’ve been working on Dependency Injection and produced over an hour’s worth of video material so far on the Dependency Injection Container alone. My mission is to uncover all of the mystery of frameworks so ask me anything you wanna know about the course. I’ve already included material based on suggestions received. You can check out the 70 min preview here: https://youtu.be/u3hN_r1DwSQ Some early views and likes would be very much appreciated 🙏 ...

  I learn something new every day. I have done almost every day for as long as I can remember. It’s now just a habit and something which I prioritize over my daily work. You might be surprised by that but I’ve programmed myself to think about the long game.  In five years time, nobody is going to know or care about me completing a user story inside a sprint in 2023. But it will be noticeable if I’ve studied my craft and improved my skills every day for the last 5 years. I regularly ask junior developers and testers ‘what are you going to learn today?’ and they often tell me how busy they are and that they won’t have the time. They do have the time, they just don’t prioritize it. Again, in five years time, no one will remember or care that they finished a ticket on time. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not advocating that you neglect your work. I’m simply encouraging you to ask yourself how much do you prioritize study.  Some people go through phases where they study every da...

So last week I spoke about frameworks and the importance of being able to write clean, framework-agnostic code if you wanted to be a well-rounded developer. Let me now share with you something which I have been working on since December…this will be my next full-length course on garycarke.tech: PHP Framework PRO. Nearly every PHP job position you will apply for will require you to have experience of using at least one framework. So I decided to go one further and give you the edge over all of the competition by showing you exactly how they work and how they are constructed. Starting from zero lines of code, we will build up our own custom framework, closely examining all of the component parts as we add them…each piece will be explained in a way that is easy to understand both in isolation and as part of the wider framework. By the end of the course you will have a complete understanding of front-controllers, Request classes, Response classes, routing components, controller classes, de...

I often see job postings where they are specifically asking for a Laravel developer. This doesn’t only apply to Laravel. You can replace the word Laravel with other PHP frameworks…I’ve just used that for this example.  These kind of posts make me wonder what they would take into consideration of they were interviewing the following two developers  Developer A 3 years PHP experience, all Laravel Basic object oriented PHP skills and knowledge Developer B 7 years PHP experience, other framework experience but no Laravel Strong object oriented PHP skills and knowledge For me that would be a no-brainer. An experienced PHP developer with strong OOP skills can learn a new framework and their work would be of better quality than another developer with less experience and only basic programming skills. Learning the PHP language and object-oriented programming (OOP) concepts can provide a deeper understanding of how web development works, and how to effectively build and maintain a web ...

I sometimes get asked about certain tools that I use so I figured it might be interesting to share my setup with you. For hardware, I’ve used the same MacBook Pro for the last ~5 years with the Catalina OS installed. I don’t think it is new enough to install a later OS than this.  I only use one screen which I think is 21 inches. I’ve never used 2 screens because I prefer to just tab through applications rather than keep looking in different directions and I always have my screen just sat flat on my desk and not on a stand. For my editor, I’ve used only PHPStorm for quite a few years and doubt that I’ll ever use anything else. Other editors have been hailed as the latest-greatest editor but they always seem to need quite a lot of config to get them to work with PHP like PHPStorm does, so why change? Before PHPStorm, I used Netbeans and Sublime. I’ve used a few themes over the years including custom ones which I created myself but I’m now using Material Darker and people seem quite ...

  I was scrolling through Twitter the other day and I saw a tweet by Adam Wathan which made me stop and read the whole thread : “Learning is more important than your ego. I ask for help about dumb shit on Twitter all the time, no one thinks I’m stupid and I have grown 100x as a result. I literally started a podcast just to get people to explain things to me that I didn’t fully understand” - Adam Wathan The tweet is actually a couple of years old but the message contained within it could have been written two hundred years ago and it would still be just as valid and valuable.  You can only gain from admitting that you don’t understand something and seeking help to fill that knowledge gap. There is nothing to gain from pretending to understand something that you don’t. In fact, you’ve just lost a learning opportunity instead. I get asked a few questions in my courses but I’m sure that my students have questions that they wanted to ask but didn’t. I’ve never once thought I’m bein...

My wife told me the other day that she was surprised by the number of Elon Musk’s past business failures. I was surprised too but for a different reason; I expected there to be more! If you want to be successful at anything, you’ve got to fail (or at least suck) at it first…it’s part of the process. I reckon I could apply that hypothesis to anything that I’m currently capable of doing. Failure is also the part of the learning process which protects us and others. Think about the pilot in the flight simulator crashing into the side of a mountain. Think about your code and the hundreds of error messages you will see before you ever get let loose on production code. No one wants the pilot to be facing that mountain scenario for the first time in a real plane carrying real passengers. No one wants us to see a certain error message for the first time AFTER it has hit production. This is a week in which Sam Bankman-Frieds FTX crypto exchange went down in flames and Elizabeth Holmes was jaile...

  A few months ago, I was scrolling through my LinkedIn when a saw a post from a girl who said that she was thinking of quitting pursuing a career in tech because she just couldn't grasp Git. What made this curious to me was the fact that she was able to understand things which are much more complex (to me, at least). So I cast my mind back to when I was in her position, just starting out, and I do recall being quite overwhelmed by Git when I first encountered it. There are so many things that you can do with it but most learners are just working on small tutorial projects on their own...no collaborators. Being shown hundreds of different commands in Git 'God mode' makes no practical sense. That's not only confusing but it's also unrealistic. Most developers, self included, don't use anywhere near all of Git's features. I've forgotten more Git commands than I actually know and use regularly. So this is a long way of saying that I decided to make a Git an...

Hello and thank you so much for checking out my work. My name is Gary Clarke and I'm a software developer with many years experience, primarily in PHP. I started creating video tutorials during lockdown in 2020 because I wanted the challenge of being able to explain complex / technical subjects to others in a way which is easy to understand and remember. At this moment in time, my videos have been watched nearly half a million times and I intend to keep creating new and improved content and teaching more and more new people. It would be my pleasure to see you on the inside of one of my courses. Subscribe and get a $29 course for FREE! Join GaryClarkeTech today and get A Git + Github course for FREE * indicates required Email Address * First Name ...