NYCPHP Meetup

[Leam Hall]

Morning all! I'm happy to say that my programming growth hasn't yet been 
side tracked by the job search, relocation plans, or really hot weather. 
It's slow going, but going nonetheless.

I could use some experienced programmer wisdom on next steps. At the 
moment I'm working on a small PHP project. Design goals are 5.3 
compatible, use OOP as appropriate, and not nauseate real programmers 
who look at the code. I've also put it on SF.net and started using 
tickets for work tracking, a pseudo Kanban style queue, and David K. 
gave me some great UX feedback.

Being learning driven, I'm a bit lost wondering about my next step. One 
thought is to get Knuth's vols 1-4a and start on those. Another is to 
push towards the Zend ZCE in PHP; sort of "master one skill" before 
moving on to others. Or to learn more about support tools like TDD, and 
IDE bedsides vim, or other stuff.

In programming, I've done several "very small" projects in Tcl, PHP, 
Perl, Python, Shell, C. My skill level is highest in Shell and PHP but 
even those are "pick up the book every hour or so". I'd like to get to a 
point of being able to contribute to medium sized projects in either 
PHP, Python, Go, or C.

At this point I am aware of what little I do know but don't know what I 
don't know. Any recommendations on how to move up the professional 
programmer ladder?

Thanks!

Leam