Ruben Elizondo Offers His Two Cents On The Future Of PHP Development

Ruben Elizondo is a senior having 25 years of experience in CRM Software under his belt, and over 15 years of experience in PHP, SQL, Javascript, HTML, and CSS.

Ruben is currently serving as a senior PHP developer at Norwex USA. Today, we have him onboard with Hostnoc, and here’s what he has to say about it:

Hostnoc: Hi Ruben! It has been a great pleasure to have you, first of all, we would like to thank you for taking out your precious time. Before we start, we would like to know the major highlights of your career as a developer.

Ruben: Hi. Since the early ’90s, I’ve been working in the consumer wholesale/retail industry, mostly developing ERP, CRM, and Accounting applications/modules/enhancements; first doing code with a business-oriented BASIC language called BBx (basis.com) and later, in the early 2,000’s, with PHP.

Major highlights, I contributed with a handful of code lines to optimize business processes and improve user experience/productivity in daily tasks for such organizations, while alleviating the operating costs at the same time.

Hostnoc: Ruben, you have years of experience under your belt. How do you think about the future of people in PHP, SQL, HTML and Javascript field? When everything is going well for AI, how do you think a web developer can sustain his job?

Ruben: There may come a time when machines would be able to write an algorithm to represent a process and the code to run it, but that time is way too far in the future. In the meanwhile, there is a constant growth in demand for good programmers, as today, there is no organization around the world that can run without computers, and computers need programs to work. With an ever-growing world population, and organizations with it, in my opinion, choosing to be a software developer is a really good choice and will be for many years to come.

Hostnoc: PHP has been considered a major part of web development, PHP recently shifted to 7.3, what do you think about the newer version of PHP? And the pros and cons of it?

Ruben: Php 7.x is light years apart from 5.x and its predecessors. They did a really great job with it, and this ensures that PHP will continue ruling the web development world. Of course, as i used to say to my colleagues, PHP was fun until it started looking like java 🙂

This means that today, PHP should be taken seriously, and it takes lots of training hours to become a real PHP developer.

Hostnoc: Having so much experience, what do you think kept you going? and who were your inspirations when it comes to PHP development?

Ruben: I love what I do, and every day I find fascination in trying to make happy end users, providing them with easier to use, better- looking and faster execution of their daily apps.

Hostnoc: People in the community have been raging war over two things: HTML and PHP. Since you have worked in both, which one do you think is more effective in terms of security and usability?

Ruben: You can’t compare apples and oranges. Html is a markup language to let the browser know how to render a web page, where to use Title tags, bold tags, quotes, etc.. but once the page is rendered, HTML doesn’t provide the functionality to change the content, or dynamically load different content for each part of the predefined HTML sections based on user requests.

This is why we have PHP, because of the need to have a way to build a response with all these pieces of data, requested by the user. Of course, PHP is one in many languages, there are many more like javascript, java, python, etc. But PHP is the most widely used in the world of web applications.

Hostnoc: Most people who speak languages other than  English (i.e. Dutch, Urdu, Hindi) complain about PHP. How can they deal with this dilemma?

Ruben: Without disrespect to anyone, the IT world has been developed mostly by English spoken people, and if you want to talk IT, you must talk English.

However, php.net has documentation available in different languages, and all developers around the world understand that we are living in a globalized world, and the English language is the way to communicate and interact in the IT world.

Hostnoc: You have worked in Brinker International, RealPage, Inc. and now Norwex. How do you think these companies have taught you over the years?

Ruben: All these are great companies, with really nice work environments and great employee culture.

Hostnoc: Ruben, it is clear that Web Hosting is a must when you go for web development, as you know Hostnoc is one of the fastest and cheapest web hosting providers in the world, how do you think it gives a positive impact for a developer?

Ruben: A hosting provider that can provide affordable hosting, easy and fast instant deployment, cutting-edge technology hardware, and a 99.99% guaranteed uptime, is highly appreciated.