Many of the DBA's at Valcora, began their careers as PHP Programmers, or before... We remember times sitting in a small office together writing PHP code before there were even books on the subject! We were scouring the web looking for examples and such and relying heavy on the documentation at the php.net site!
We wrote custom shopping carts before the days of oscommerce, zencart, and such. We wrote code to interface with payment gateways and process credit cards live. We also wrote code to pull products from MySQL databases, show staff members, and such. We worked for a newspaper group and were writing news "engines" to pull the articles, archive data, etc.
Why am I reminiscing about all of that? Well, because frankly, we have been there. We know a lot of other developers are still there doing the kind of work that we began with. We know that we can help others not to make the same mistakes we have seen some of our clients make. Sometimes we reflect back and think if only we knew then what we know now. I know it sounds like a cliche, but true nonetheless. That is why we believe we can help so many businesses out with our hard-earned experience.
And too, we remember doing things that we would like to forget. Making mistakes with the programming and especially the databases that no one ought to be making. But, we learned from those as well. Fortunately, we saw far more mistakes by companies we partnered with than we were making ourselves. As with our own, we learned from those bad decisions and decided never to make them ourselves.
As we go along, we will be sharing some of those mistakes with you. Though it may be painful to remember what we saw done wrong and the late night hours we worked because of it, we hope that those experiences will be of value to others like ourselves today. If we can save another programmer or developer from losing their job because they made the same mistake we have seen before, then we have accomplished our goals.
Look forward to reading some of those exploits and learning from the mistakes we have experienced first-hand. While we didn't make the majority of the mistakes ourselves, we certainly did benefit by learning how to avoid such problems and have done well in steering clear of such mishaps.
Ah, those were the days, we sometimes want to forget...
