PHP Interview With Enrico Zimuel Senior Software Engineer At Zend Technologies – Everything Is An Array In PHP

About This Interview

A Small Intro..

In this edition, I talked with Enrico Zimuel a computer geek since he was 9yrs old. He has written a couple of books namely “Secrets, Spies and Cipher Codes” published by Apogeo in 1999 and the recent “How to use the digital sign” published by Tecniche Nuove in 2010. Enrico has a pretty impressive ‘geek’ path. He also speaks at many international conferences, for instance phpDay, International PHP Conference, PHP Barcelona Conference, PHP North West Conference, Common Europe, ZendCon, TechWeb, SMAU, VLDB. You can find his presentations on slideshare – some of his talks include :-

• Manage cloud infrastructures in PHP using Zend Framework 2
• Cryptography in PHP

The Interview With Enrico Zimuel

1) Please tell us a bit about yourself

I’m a Software Engineer since 1996 and I work as Senior PHP Engineer at Zend Technologies in the Zend Framework Core Team.
If you want to know more about me you can check my website.

2) How you started with PHP

I use PHP since 1999 and I started to use this language to build web applications. At that time and still now PHP is one of the best computer language for the web.

3) How do you find PHP now as compared to when you first started

PHP 5 is very different from PHP 3 that I used more than 10 years ago.
PHP 5 is completely object oriented and more focused to enterprise applications. Moreover the performance of the last version are huge compared with the PHP 3.

4) Based on your experience, what are the good and bad parts of PHP

The good parts of PHP are the performance and the simplicity to use. The performance are very good because the architecture of the language is very light and it scale very well (this is why most of the biggest Internet companies use it). Moreover, you don’t need a background in computer science to write a script in PHP. Actually, this can be sometime also the bad part because if you don’t know what are you doing, you can build applications that are very difficult to maintain.

5) What would be the Top advice to a PHP beginner

Start with a good tutorial, there are a lot of good books and online articles. The most important advice is to study the source code of open source applications. There are millions of line of code that you can read from the best PHP developers in the world.

6) To someone who wants to become a better PHP developer, what is your
advice?

See above

7) The best PHP book you’ve read

“PHP 5 Power Programming” by Andi Gutmans, Stig Bakken, and Derick Rethans

8) A PHP blog or resource you highly recommend

There are a lot of good PHP blogs, some of them:

• http://mwop.net/
• http://sebastian-bergmann.de/blog/
• http://fabien.potencier.org/
• http://toys.lerdorf.com/
• http://derickrethans.nl/

9) The IDE that you use

I use Zend Studio or Eclipse to write in PHP.

10) How do you debug your PHP code, do you use something like xdebug or
krumo..etc?

I use the Zend Debugger or XDebug.

11) A CMS that you think is worthwhile

I use WordPress for my blog. The PHP code of WordPress is not the best in the world but it works very well.

12) A PHP framework you use and would recommend

Zend Framework of course, but I’m this business 🙂

13) One PHP person that you admire and what strikes you about him/her

Matthew Weier O’Phinney is one the best PHP developer that I meet so far. He is the team leader of Zend Framework project.

14) One function that you like

There is not a special function that I use more frequently. I really like the array functions of PHP they help a lot during the development.
As you know, everything is an array in PHP 🙂

15) One PHP Community that you recommend

The official website of PHP with the all mailing list is a must, of course.
Moreover there are a lot of other good PHP communities, some of these are:

• http://devzone.zend.com/
• http://www.phpdeveloper.org/
• http://pear.php.net/
• http://pecl.php.net/

16) The never ending debates on PHP would be.. ?

The future of PHP 6 and I hope we will have shortly a final answer on this question.

17) In the next 5 years, how do you foresee the PHP ecosystem

I think we will have more enterprise developers. If you see the job request of PHP developers you will find a lot of enterprise companies asking for senior engineers with more than 5 years of experience, certifications, framework knowledge, and so on.

18) Recently Microsoft has also started actively to concentrate on PHP, any comments on that?

This is a very good news for PHP. I think this is the first time that Microsoft officially support an open source software. This will help the PHP community to grow with more emphasis.

19) If you had to go back in time, would you still choose PHP?

Yes, definitely. It’s so easy to write code in PHP and the business benefits are huge.

20) Last, feel free to talk a bit about any of your PHP project (and how can a beginner benefit from it)

I’m involved in the Zend Framework open source project and I think that this project can help web developers to write professional applications in PHP, with a solid architecture, and to focus the attention on the business logic of their applications instead of technical details of web development.

Now Do Your Part!

1) Help diffuse this interview to the PHP ecosystem – Share, tweet and spread the word to your audience ==> That would be a FREE way to thank me 😉
2) Make a comment below using the comment form – I’m sure you can at least say 1 word about this interview

{I’m thankful to your response(s)!}