Hey there, I don't post here much but thought this would be an appropriate place to reach out to my fellow Laravelers. To get my intro background out of the way, I'm not a CS degree holder, stumbled upon Laravel at version 2 (when Taylor's pic featured him with a cap and a big ol smile), I work as a PHP developer full time, and I do all things web for a side business by night including a busy e-commerce Laravel app with around 2500 users. I fell into development after getting a marketing degree and loved it, stumbled upon Laravel like I said, and have been able to support my family by freelancing ever since (most of the time Laravel, though unfortunately not my current professional position). You know the drill I'm guessing! Now that I've got that out of the way.
I love the "Laravel stack", if you will. I leverage Forge for handling my servers, Homestead for local development, they make life a breeze and they've always served me well. I can't say enough about how happy I am that they are around so I can get to the point and serve my clients' needs. In short, the Laravel ecosystem gives me the confidence to say to anyone "yes, I can do that for you no problem." Thank you Taylor and all contributors.
I've landed the opportunity to interview for my dream job which will require an out of state relocation for my young family. They want to go with Laravel + Vue which is fantastic and will make me a happy guy. The salary is great, benefits, etc. In my experience in the (PHP-coding) industry, you'll of course want to say you're a LAMP stack developer and that you're favored framework is Laravel (which most people have heard of) and away you go. But during the interview process, you'll inevitably have to prove your LAMP skills by taking a technical exam - and it seems the trend is to go with real-time remote testing/coding while you're being watched on the other end (kinda intimidating at times). You'll also likely need to sit in a conference room while your peers grill you with questions about the web, PHP, Apache, Linux, and MySql.
Here's the point of this whole thing if you're still reading :) I'm totally confident in PHP as Laravel promotes the use of clean code, using native functions rather than framework magic. However, using Forge/Homestead, (thankfully) means you don't have to fuss around with dev ops. And, most of the time, Eloquent means you don't have to be a MySql guru. But when you've got to prove your salt, you need to know this stuff (and that is valid).
My question to the community here is: how do you stay up to date with LAMP skills? Any resources? Books? Practices? Any other thoughts on the matter? I'm very curious about what you all have to say!
Thanks for reading!
