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I think your comment is really unfair to the guy. You act like he spent 10 years writing shitty PHP apps with out ever even trying to learn anything, which simply isn't true.

In the article he says he mentions using Twitter Bootstrap before he'd even discovered CodeIgniter. Bootstrap was released about 2.5 years ago, so in 2 and a half years he's gone from insecure raw PHP apps, through CodeIgniter and ORMs, to Python with Django. Sounds like a dev who's constantly learning and improving to me. And don't forget he's 18 and in school, so web dev isn't even his full time job.

My advice to the OP would be if you're not feeling at home in Django try Rails. I went from raw PHP, through CodeIgniter, and now I use Rails. Rails instantly felt very natural for me, maybe it will for you as well.

The guy is 18. Who cares?

> Talking about node.js or NoSQL or puppet or ansible or other "new technology" and be greeted by ignorance.

You'd be greeted by a great big meh from me and I make considerably more than $100/hour.

Your definition of 'basic stuff' is not inspiring. My definition would include processes and threads, I/O and networking, conversations around which also happen to often be greeted with ignorance.

yes, agreed. Those were examples. Talking about low level OS basics or POSIX or whatever is the same. What i wanted to say is that so many people never seem to get out of a very tiny skillset, for years. It's the worst people to work with, in my experience.

Have you ever deployed PHP to shared hosting? Seriously, you drag and drop the site in your FTP client. Deployed. This is how the majority of the PHP world does it. So it's completely unsurprising that someone from a PHP only background finds deploying other technologies harder.

Sure i have. As most web developers (i imagine) i started writing my first page in PHP, hardcoded passwords in a .php file which did also output HTML, it was "awesome" :P

Deploying PHP also means updating database schemas or configuring .htaccess or configuring apache or updating php modules. Deploying a django app can be as easy as upload + restart django. Everyone doing a little bit of development should have no problem automating that tiny bit.

I don't disagree that everyone doing web development should understand migrations and the server stack. And yet it's completely unsurprising to me that a guy still in high school is unaware or ignorant to it, regardless of when he started out.

Yes, ok, he is 18, that's true, so my post is probably a bit harsh. But still, if he keeps that attitude he'll be 30 or 40 and use Django in a time where everyone has moved on to new stuff(tm).

Age isn't the only issue. He is surrounded by other teenagers and probably has no peers to help guide him in real life.

I think he's the kind of young developer that when he moves on to university or the workplace he'll rapidly broaden his skills.

I am totally confused how this comment is even relevant. You have literally no basis for it, and it is not even remotely true.

I am basing it on the influence a person's environment has on them. At the workplace or university, a person is more likely to encounter influential peers and mentors.

Telling me a developer is likely to get the same kind of experience working bit jobs as a contractor in high school as they are either doing the same while pursing a CS degree, or working in a development team is preposterous.

Edit: I just realised you're the OP. Add "gaining some maturity" to the things you'll get from the above.

I make more money in one week with my full-service IT firm that you could imagine in one week of development.

Don't even come in here saying that I have been living under a rock. I am the owner of my company, on the board with three more technology companies and also a director for a non-profit.

Probably all true, but based solely on this blog post i still wouldn't hire your IT service super company, blabla.. (to be clear, i have seen enough guys calling themselves CEO of a one man limited or whatever, i don't care for titles or how you are on "the board" of three firms, i'm a tech guy, not someone that is impressed by titles or certificates.).

Edit: Still kudos to you, for running a business at that age, respect for that!

I doubt he, or I for that matter, would want to do work for you anyhow, so there's that as well. There are those who don't gauge the quality of a product by the number of buzz words the technology stack contains. You should re-evaluate your techno-elitism for your own sake.

It's nothing to do with techno-elitism, it's to do with the fact that, as an engineer, the most important skill you need to have is to know the right tool for the right job. If you only know about a very limited subset, you're doing it wrong. There is nothing wrong with using PHP for the right job, or whatever else. You still should make an educated decision and not just use something because you don't know better. I give a damn about buzzwords and find many things very questionable when it comes to the latest and greatest in the interweb.

Edit: In the end i feel like i have to justify my post more then i want to. It's not that i hate that guy or that i think he is a bad programmer or a bad person or whatever. I was just surprised to read that someone who has been coding PHP for 7 years never used an ORM. I imagine that most people that want to learn "web programming" start with a framework that includes an ORM. He surely has a big benefit over "competitors" who only know ORMs and never cared about the underlying SQL. That's surely not good as well.

those are great accomplishments, but I still wouldn't hire you to do web development at my company. Kudos for expanding your horizons though. Hope everything goes well for you.

Your blog post was about a technical skill, bragging about your non-technical skills is not a rebuttal.