#4 Interview With Lukas Kahwe Smith
This is the fourth ‘social’ interview in a series with the phpDay 2012 speakers: it’s ‘social’ because the questions have been submitted and voted online on Facebook.
We are happy to introduce you Lukas Smith, an experienced PHP developer, he spends most of his time playing with Symfony2 as well as pushing the PHPCR ecosystem.
He will give a session at phpDay called “PHPCR – PHP Content Repository Specification” Friday 18th May at 5:30 pm on track 2.
The Interview:
Things that you consider before choosing a framework for a project?
As I work in a web agency, the main criteria is does it cover the common use cases. Does it do this in a way that facilitates code reuse and testing?
Furthermore how strong is the community in producing quality extensions and supporting each other?
What should i learn next?
PHPCR :)
What are your throughts about functional programming?
Its been a while since I have taken a serious look at functional programming. Back in University we learned Opal. I loved the beauty of the final solutions, but dreaded refactoring.
Who’s your programming hero?
My father. I still remember when we got this weird Apricot computer and he wrote an english word trainer in Basic. I “played” with it all day :)
What features would you like to see in the next PHP version?
Getting interfaces for common stuff like caching, logging, http request/response etc.
What’s the average beer per hour factor during conferences and a normal hangout?
0.0
What do you think about php 5.4 traits?
I would have preferred Grafts (https://wiki.php.net/rfc/horizontalreuse#grafts_-_class_composition_not_implemented)
We still have a lot of learning to do, but it has the potential of becoming a very significant tool for PHP developers.
What do you like and what not about php?
I like that so far I never felt that a problem I needed to solve required me to program in another language.
Which opensource projects are you following the most?
Symfony2 and PHPCR .. though I guess these days also Drupal, despite having never used it, let alone installed it :)
Suggest a book to read.
I know SQL is not hip these days, but “SQL Performance Tuning” by Peter Gulutzan and Trudy Pelzer was probably the most important book for my career. I learned so much, which gave me the confidence to really step up and from there I was able to grow my knowledge in every direction I needed to go.
