I’ve been coding in PHP off and on for years now.  Each project I’ve done thus far has always been by hand.  Doing the architecture of your site by hand is the easiest way to introduce bugs and end up with sloppy code.   For the first time I’ve started a project where I used a framework in PHP.  My framework? Codeigniter.  I like it’s simplicity, MFC design and how it’s not like Rails.  I thought Rails was a bit too complicated and involved hacking the internal code way too much to get anything done, but that’s a whole other rant.

Anyway, the project I’m working on?  Just a twitter clone.  Why?  For the sake of learning, that’s all.  It’s actually for a project in school.  The idea is to implement this idea in something that I’m already familiar with (PHP) and then implement it again in another language I’m not familiar with at all.  After I’m doing with the first part I want to implement it in Python using the Django framework.  Python has always been one of those languages I’ve been meaning to learn.  In fact it seems I try to learn it every summer, but I just don’t seem to have the dedication to sit in doors learning it.

Regardless, I hope to use this knowledge in my professional life.  The last PHP project I worked on was stressful just because of some of the design decisisons I made (Doing a half-assed MVC implementation…didn’t do the best job of dividing up the view and controller).  However, I’ve learned from those mistakes and I might be taking up a new project at work where I’ll probably be using this framework.