We hardly remember people who operate behind the screens whenever we watch a movie but does it make sense not to praise someone who made filming the entire movie possible?
I often feel it’s unfair to the people who are responsible for the backend support while we only appreciate what’s in front of our eyes. Similarly, backend developers are the spinal cord of every website, application, and digital platform that we visit when it comes to the web development industry. Where front end developers manage the visible parts of an online program such as the functionality or the display design, backend programmers dedicate their time and efforts to fixing, altering and designing the aspects of a software or information system that our audience might not see.
Backend developers serve as the wizards of the tech industry’s Oz, crafting and modifying the components and the core features to give our users the best ever digital experience.
Whenever a user makes a request to the system through a consumer side (frontend framework), it becomes a backend developer’s responsibility to ensure that the program can deliver any given request or information. That’s why skilled backend developers are always in high demand since every platform connected to a server runs on logic-based decisions controlled by the backend team.
Now that we are talking about it, In the backend realm, PHP is one of the oldest and most popular programming languages used for backend programming. So If you are a tech company or a business or product owner, that finds itself in need to hire PHP programmers for building websites, applications or sophisticated login programs, you have landed on just the right blog.
In this article, we will explore every aspect of a PHP developer. We will help you understand the whereabouts of a PHP developer through real-time projects and examples so that you know all the Dos and Don’ts insights when you hire one Here; we will cover
- Benefits of PHP in your project
- PHP developer Job description
- Requirements of a PHP developer
- Roles and responsibilities of a PHP developer
- A day in the life of a PHP programmer
- Real-time PHP projects and Ideas
- Frequently asked questions while hiring a PHP developer.
Let’s start by talking about why we need PHP for our next project?
Despite being around for almost three decades, PHP still makes the headlines among the most prominent and distinguished server-side development languages throughout the world. Unlike Java or Python, PHP is a scripted language, which means that it can interpret scripts or programming instructions to improve the performance of the system and automate routine processes.
By the statistics shared by Guru99, PHP owns over 20 million websites and applications. Moreover, PHP was groundbreaking right from its release. Over the course of the past few years, this language has seen many improvements and makeovers eventually becoming the language we admire today. PHP has been a foundation for sites like Facebook and WordPress and is also versatile in various web functions.
Especially for business owners, PHP can work wonders for your online platforms.
Benefits Of PHP in your Project
- PHP can support large and massive databases.
- Since the language is platform-independent, it is well versed with almost every platform.
- PHP is open-source, which means that you do not have to rely on the manufacturer for the updated version.
- Requires very low development and maintenance cost.
- PHP gives high performance, scalability and reliability.
There are endless benefits of choosing PHP in today’s advancing and continually evolving tech world. Therefore, If you have decided to hire a PHP developer, it’s definitely a brilliant verdict.
Now, before we check out several requirements and responsibilities, we need to get our hands on the PHP developer job description while hiring. Writing a good advertisement and description will require attention to detail. For Instance, If you are looking to hire an advanced PHP developer, merely posting a generic description in your job Ad will pile up with several unwanted applications from candidates who may have little knowledge of the language. To assure you the perfect candidate that matches your criteria, let us work over on a job description.
Job description for an advanced PHP developer:
We are looking for a PHP developer to manage backend services and interchange data between the users and the server. Your primary focus will be maintaining the central database, developing all server-side logic, and ensuring high performance towards responsiveness and requests from the front end. You will also be integrating the front end components built by your co-workers into the application; therefore, basic knowledge of the front end technologies is necessary.
You can also add other required skills accordingly to source out the desired and potential candidate. Now that we have put forward our advertisement, it is time to checklist other factors on the list.
Let’s then take a look at several requirements of a PHP developer
If you are looking for a PHP developer, make sure that you are well aware of all the duties and requirements of one. Following are some of the essential qualifications and skills that a PHP specialist must possess.
- A bachelor’s degree in computer science or a similar field.
- A comprehensive understanding of PHP frameworks including CodeIgniter, Laravel and Yii.
- Knowledge of frontend technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, Javascript etc.
- Previous experience in creating scalable websites or applications.
- Ability to manage and lead the projects and development team.
- Familiarity with SQL/NoSQL databases.
- Problem-solving skills.
- Knowledge of integrating multiple data sources into one.
- Proficient understanding of code versioning tools like Git.
- In-depth knowledge of MVC design patterns.
- Familiarity with the limitations of PHP language as a platform and its whereabouts.
- Basic skills like acquisition with fully synchronous behaviour of PHP.
These are the mandatory qualifications and skills required in an advanced PHP developer to comfortably handle all your projects.
Apart from the requirements, we also need specific roles and responsibilities to be carried out by the developer.
Following is the list of responsibilities and duties that you can discuss with your potential candidate during the interview.
A PHP developer must:
- Maintain and prepare all applications utilizing standard development tools.
- Maintain, record and develop cutting edge web-based PHP applications on all portals plus premium service platforms.
- Relate technical as well as non-technical specifications along with a description of all procedures.
- Review product-related documents and participate for calls integration with the partners.
- Lead responsibility to develop, design, evaluate and assist, application systems.
- Allocate and manage clear plus complete documentation.
- Evaluate and interpret business needs for determining risks with accurate design apt solutions.
- Interact with all the experienced functional consultants with the purpose to write design parameters.
- Prepare solutions with complete application tools to execute client-specific interfaces, data analysis libraries and workflow.
- Write all clean object-oriented PHP as well as efficient SQL.
- Guide business decisions from a technical perspective such as reliability, performance, scalability and security.
- Maintain current websites and write semantic markup.
As a business owner, even you would want your employee to feel like a family in order to go a long way. When equating their employees’ everyday schedules as their own, business owners and managers makes the employees feel valued in the company. So, how about we bring a day in the life of a PHP developer to the spotlight.
A Day In the Life of a PHP Developer:
So far, we have talked about the skills and the qualifications that you would like to see in people forging a career in PHP development. But what does a PHP developer do on a typical day at work?
On a regular day, the developer finds himself at the desk on his usual time to work around mail, set up the workstation and catch up with the teammates. After this, he usually would attend a meeting regarding the current project, where everyone discusses the coming challenges and tries to come up with an apt solution.
The developer spends most of his time creating PHP code for his section of the group’s project. He works closely with the front-end team to ensure a successful development process. When the developer is not working on any project, he studies trending PHP frameworks like Laravel, Zend, and CodeIgniter. He also does research work on several databases like MySQL and other console commands.
Apart from the daily tasks, the projects are always an exciting part of the job. PHP developers generally have different long-term goals, for instance, migrating to Java or working full time in mobile app development. I stated this fact so that one gets clear about the career opportunities given or taken in the organization.
Now that we have almost covered all the sections of the process of hiring a PHP developer, the only thing that completes your recruitment process is the interview.
A Job description can bring you a potential candidate that bears all the criteria in your checklist.
And when you have your potential candidate in the room, you must make sure that you ask the right questions. To do so, you can take help from the below mentioned frequently asked questionnaire that covers almost all the basic and advanced knowledge aspects for PHP development.
FAQs while hiring a PHP developer
You can start with fundamental questions such as:
- Why are you so interested in PHP?
- How long have you been working with PHP?
- Mention some of the PHP projects that you executed successfully.
- Apart from PHP, what other languages are you well versed with?
To get a more technical outlook of the developer, you can go with these advanced questions.
Q – What is a recommended PHP version according to you?
A- The latest PHP versions are 7.2.30, 7.3.17, and 7.4.5, released in April 2020 and highly recommended.
Q – Explain how we can handle exceptions in PHP?
A – When an exception is shown, code following the statement will not be executed. Further, PHP attempts to find the first matching catch block. If it doesn’t catch the exception, a PHP Fatal error gets issued with an “uncaught exception”. This way an exception can be thrown and handled within PHP.
Q – Are objects in PHP, caught by value or reference?
A – In PHP, objects are passed by values.
Q – What is PDO in PHP?
A – PDO refers to PHP Data Object, which is a set of PHP extensions that provide a core database and PDO class.
In addition to this, you can also ask the candidate to perform a code. Further, go for someone who can verse with your front-end team as well. Coordination and compatibility are equally important, along with subjective knowledge.
Wrapping Up:
Many high-profile organizations and industries rely on PHP when it comes to scalability and long-term usage. PHP development is an absolutely viable choice due to its continually evolving modern programming concepts and methodologies. I hope you caught an insightful read with this article concerning everything you need to know about PHP development.
