Sometimes you have to learn things the hard way.

I started programming PHP when version 3 roamed the earth. It was a crude beast then, and to some it is still a crude beast. Coming from a primarily system administration background I know the specific tweaks to security and variable handling more than most.

Recently I have been updating my skills by doing small projects with the various frameworks developed using PHP. I have done some dabbling in CakePHP and CodeIgnighter, most of my time has however been spent in Symfony while giving a look towards picking up some Zend in the future.

Symfony has been interesting and the most “Rails-like” of all that I have tried. Using Doctrine as an ORM has been a trial and a refreshing take on data persistence in an application. I like the idea of not having to programmatically handle all database queries, but I miss the level of fine grained control that straight SQL gives you. The next challenge on my personal plate is to experiment with NoSQL type databases such as MongoDB.