Biggest Challenges

This post is a response to the following Bloganuary January 1 prompt:

I have challenges in life. To keep things short and simple, I’ll just focus on challenges related to my work in Automattic right now.

The one biggest challenge for me in Automattic is PHP.

I joined Automattic in September 2020 as a Senior JavaScript Engineer. I like JavaScript, front-end development with React, and all the UI visual stuff. I did not have professional development experience with PHP in my career prior to that. (I should talk about my professional career and my thoughts and experience with PHP in separate posts.)

Throughout the past three years in Automattic, I have received feedbacks from my team leads and peers, that PHP is the biggest thing in my “room for improvement” department.

And, just like how I have been thinking to start this blog, I have also been thinking to challenge my own status quo, get out of my comfort zone, and work on leveling up my PHP skills.

The easiest one is probably learn by reviewing. For example, I reviewed the PHP code in PR Force marketing menu items order in our WooCommerce repo.

But reviewing and reading code isn’t the same as writing code. I should start writing and getting my hands dirty with PHP.

I did start with some small steps, writing PHP code by referring to some existing PHP code base with some minor changes. For example, I created PR Add Default Fallback Marketing Channel Recommendations recently, which is one of the projects I’m working on.

I’m hoping one day, my PHP skill would be good enough that I am comfortable to create an app or a WordPress plugin on my own, e.g. a to-do list plugin, inspired by TodoMVC.

I think that would be a pretty good milestone to celebrate.