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by ChrisMarshallNY 1409 days ago
> PHP is pretty good despite the hate

I suspect the "hate" is rather localized.

I find the "Fishtank Graph"[0] to be a fairly good way to get my feet firmly planted back on the ground.

That said, I don't like PHP, and avoid it, if possible. I use it for my backend work, and it does a great job, there. I just prefer writing apps in Swift.

The "game-changer," for me, was retiring, and working on the stuff I want to work on, at my pace, and using my methodologies. No more insecure middle managers, pissing on my work, and no more insecure co-workers, fighting over every detail, and deliberately sabotaging team dynamics (to be fair, I spent a good part of my career, as a manager, which I hated, but it paid the bills).

I know that retiring is not an option for a lot of folks, and realize how fortunate I am (I didn't feel that way, at first, though. My retirement was not by choice).

But it's not work, if you love what you do.

These days (and for the last five years), I actually get more done, every day, by 10AM, than I used to get done, all day, in the office. My GH activity graph is solid green (no exaggeration), and it isn't "gamed," like so many of them. I do two things, every day:

1) I walk three miles, and

2) I write Swift code.

Life is good.

[0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin...

2 comments

> and working on the stuff I want to work on, at my pace, and using my methodologies.

I had one excerpt of that, did part time manual labour gig, coding during night and mornings on a side project. It was quite blissful. No negative emotion only pure intrinsic motivation. The manual labour gig acted as a good time constraint (30min to make a clean patch, 1h to think of how to add this feat) and gave a good balance of creativity and productivity. No bad colleague, no friction, no unwanted feature.

Nice stats. Pretty surprising how Java's doing better than JS in overall market share, and growth.
Lots of infrastructure written in Java, and I suspect it still features heavily in school curriculum development.