Building Your PHP Geek Cred To Publicly Be An Awesome PHP Developer

If you’ve read the PHP|Architect Magazine – March 2011 Edition, you have surely enjoyed the nice article by Jason Austin (a PHP developer from Raleigh, NC) titled “Good PHP help is hard to find”. Jason talks about ‘the why‘ and ‘the how‘ to distinguish yourself as a qualified PHP Professional from the crowd. And the way to do that is: “You have to build your geek cred“. I think he did a brilliant job with the article.

How To Build Your PHP Cred

• +10 Geek Cred Points :: Subscribe to a prominent magazine dedicated exclusively to PHP, namely php|architect
• +25 Geek Cred Points :: (per certification) Get certified with recognised certifications like the Zend Certified Engineer program
• +30 Geek Cred Points :: (per project) Contribute actively and generously to open source projects
• +15 Geek Cred Points :: Blog about PHP { have a blog dedicated to it }
• +50 Geek Cred Points :: Issue a pull request on Github
• +15 Geek Cred Points :: Mention / link to / show your StackOverflow profile on your blog { THOUGHT: Are you just asking questions, or helping others? }
• +200 Geek Cred Points :: Start a PHP meetup group near you
• +10 Geek Cred Points :: Sign up to attend PHP conferences around the world
• +5 Geek Cred Points :: Introduce yourself to someone new in the ‘Hall track‘ of a conference. {Question: What is a ‘hall track’? Go read March 2011 Edition 🙂 }
• +5 Geek Cred Points :: For each Javascript framework that you know how to use
• +15 Geek Cred Points :: Shape the knowledge and skills of creating and consuming web services
• +20 Geek Cred Points :: Join the PHP Community