Moving to 'advanced' Laravel / PHP usage roadmap

Don't you watch the what's new series when they come out? He even does a what's new in php (version) series.

Hi all, I've been working with PHP / Laravel for around 5 years but feel like I've become a bit stagnant and not improved much over the past few years.

I've never had a developer 'better' than me as per say, so not had anyone to learn from.

@craig_lovelock I think if you’re working at a place where you’re not being pushed, and haven’t been for a long time, then for the sake of personal development it may be time to start looking for pastures new.

My projects nowadays stick to the same CRUDy style with no testing.

I see alot of developers now posting snippets etc and I can barely understand the code as it's alot more complex (actions, testing, PHP8) etc.

Is there any resources people can recommend that would be 'advanced' Laravel or perhaps a good roadmap from being where I am now to being as good as the likes of Jeffrey, Caleb Porzio, the guys at Spatie etc.

There’s no set “roadmap” for learning. Languages and technology is always changing. There’s no 10-step plan to go from junior developer to senior developer. Different people take different paths, and have different spheres of knowledge around different topics. So I’d say focus on you.

It’s good that you’ve identified topics that you may have a shallow knowledge on (testing, etc). Testing would be a hugely beneficial skill to add to your skill set if it’s not there already. Like any skill though, the only way to get better is to practice and practice. The more code you write (and also read) exposes you to more ways around thinking about problems. The more ways you can come at a problem, the more productive you become as a developer.

I have been working with Laravel since 2018, I actually have been making a personal document called: 'becoming a PRO dev', where my focus is mostly put on: building quick, high-performant apps and understanding Laravel behind the scenes seriously.

I have always had the idea that someone was better than me, where I limited myself to try to be better than them, which I would suggest getting out of your mind: measure yourself with yourself and not someone else.

The smartest and easiest way to move up:

-> Look into open-source repository's what is there to study, participate in contributing to Laravel or somewhere else in PHP. If you find this code hard to understand, simply take it line by line.

At least make sure you understand Laravel and its core principles, service provider, dependency injection, the kernels, service container and all that. I tend to build my codebases with 250K fake data just for fun purposes and speeding it all up, then looking into the Laravel repository how the code behind this logic works.

Challenge yourself and don't compare yourself with anyone else, that would be an insult to yourself.

https://roadmap.sh/

This site also has some great techniques to help you learn more interesting subjects.