In this episode, I had a wonderful chat with fellow Australian and former expat, Nigel James, about his journey from SAP consulting to PHP, and what life was like as a consultant over so many years in London. Our time there overlapped, but we never met. We also talked about why PHP is still an excellent choice to develop with, how Laravel is a Marketing-lead development (and that that's not a good thing), and so much more.

So if you're keen to get into software consulting, or want to do better at it, tune in to hear from someone who's been doing it for years.

Some key takeaways are:

• Programming is simple: Sequence. Selection. Repetition.
• Almost regardless of your career path as a developer and your skills, you need to develop some business savvy.
• A great selling point for PHP (at least in the early days) was that you didn't have to pay Microsoft  for so much; this was one of my key motivations too, back in the PHP 3.x days.
• Are layoffs necessarily all bad, or can they actually be helpful?
• Are layoffs in tech truly necessary right now, or are they being made to satisfy investors?

Links

• ABAP
• SAP
• Zend Framework 1 (now Laminas)
• PHP London
• PHP and MySQL Web Development (Developer's Library)
• Laravel

Guest(s): Nigel James (@njames // phpc.social/@njames).

Hosted By: Matthew Setter.

Thanks for tuning in to Free the Geek. If you'd like to be a guest on the podcast or know someone who'd make a great guest, email me: matthew[at]matthewsetter.com. This podcast is produced by Matthew Setter for the Web Dev With Matt podcast network.

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