Zaalah

Excited about this! I hope this is a big shift in the community. I know I've perused these forums on multiple occasions and it's always great conversation. I just have held off on actually registering because everything feels kinda abandoned. Knowing that you guys are planning to devote more time and energy to this has gotten me to sign up and I'm looking forward to more good conversations!

I would say that some careers would encourage certs, but even then it kinda depends on the companies. Some places may value AWS certs while others only care about the Google stuff. Personally, my degree is in Marketing (lol) and I'm self-taught with 0 certs. I've been able to go from Junior to Senior developer and almost double my pay in the last 3 years. Your real-world experience and solved problems are way more valuable than a piece of paper in my limited experience.

I use Laravel Sail on a regular basis across all my projects and it's amazing. If you don't use VSCode, I would also recommend that. There's a feature in VSCode called "Remote Containers" that lets you basically write code inside your dev container. That means the integrated terminal is also automatically inside the container, which is super useful for stuff like running tests and all that. It's definitely a bit more to set up than something like PHPStorm, but I definitely enjoy the practicality of having everything neatly tied into their own containers. Edit I also see your blog isn't secured, I'd recommend slapping a cert on that bad boy. Even if you're not doing anything sensitive, it adds to the legitimacy of the project.