A reflection for myself, published for all with too much time to read about my journey.
Illustration by Stephanie Engstler
The 2nd May 2022 marks my 10 years anniversary as a web developer. Ten years ago, I had my first working day at MASSIVE ART Webservices.
I was a bloody Trainee, who had nearly no knowledge about the web. My only contact with web development was a Dreamweaver book my brother had, some simple HTML/CSS in school focused on using frames (I'm not talking about iframes here 😉), and a part of my school thesis which was written in PHP, which was my first contact with PHP. That project contains really ugly self created management UI for Microsoft Exchange user, communicating over SOAP WSDL API with a .NET application. It was a lot of a mix between HTML and application logic. It was hosted using Xampp on a Windows Server and I suppose it wasn't running for long time on that one.
My first contact with a programming language was some years before. I attended the HTL Dornbirn which had , as I would have described it at that time as a 14 year old "a school branch focused on computers". At that time, the first 2 years we didn't got into any contact with programming languages, only some logic programs with Kara and HTML. We started in the third year with C++. I think not the best language to start with, I remember I had a hard time to get my head around pointers and linked lists. Good that one year later, we continued with Java, which I think is still a great language to teach object orientated programming and a lot of design patterns, which I think the teacher did a great job focusing on this kind of things. We also learned the different sort algorithm which I no longer remember because I never had a need for them. At least they tell us there are always different ways to a solution and there is not always a wrong or a right. At the time at school I was also a passionated Gamer, playing Battlefield 2 a lot. Found out that the game could be easily modded, I created my own maps and got very interested in kind of creating 3d models. The game used Python as script language, a language I never learned and just copied some snippets together. Fun fact, at this time, I'm still not able to create a "Hello World" in Python, as I never got into any contact with that programming language again. At that time I was very interested in Game Development and was experimenting with OGRE 3D an open source cross platform Graphic Engine. Had a lot of fun when we did got the task to create a 2D tank battle game with Allegro in the school.
After school and a summer of doing nothing, now 19 years old, I had to do my compulsory military service, which I luckily could serve as radio operator, trying out the range of the new radio devices they got and drinking beer with my new friend, who I still meet from time to time to talk about the good old times and drink some beer.
After my service it was time to get a job. I assumed that I could not survive as a typical software developer doing Java, C# or even could compete with my colleagues, who already did internships in that companies. Also I could not see myself in a big company with many people, I prefer to know all my colleagues, and not wanted to be just another employee. After some search I did stumble over a web developer job advertisement from MASSIVE ART Webservices. I thought I know a little PHP, thought HTML/CSS is an elegant way to create UIs and the web could not be so hard in the end, so something I could maybe survive and not totally fail. So I sent my application documents, which, what I found out later, was I think the baddest they received, I still got a job interview and after that, a chance to start as a trainee web developer at the 2nd of May in 2012. Until today (2022) it is the only time I sent any application documents to a company, nor did I have a Job Interview with somebody. I didn't search for any alternative.
I started with another Trainee, the surely very talented and one of the funniest person I ever met, the legendary 3rfan. Always a joke on its lips and sure a very passionate developer, which I tried to keep up with.
The Agency (MASSIVE ART) had its own CMS, which was named ZOOLU.
The ZOOLU CMS was based on the Zend Framework 1. It was the time before composer did solve all our dependency problems.
It was also the time CSS / HTML was not so complicated like today. And CSS was simply minified over a special endpoint by the CMS, so it was not part of the frontend developers Job. But the web always was a fast developing business. The first precompile software I did got into contact with was Codekit.
Which we did use to compile LESS into CSS.
At my early time at MASSIVE ART, it was the switch from
prototype.js to the newcomer jQuery.
The jQuery library did grow fast and was the library which was now nearly used to
develop every new website and I think it did tell us a lot what was
missing in the standard library of JavaScript. Today most things
which were solved at that time via jQuery are now supported natively
in any browser. At the beginning it was also the end time of IE6,
all were happy as it was told we not longer need to test on IE6. Beside
the other browsers IE6 did use another box model and did make the things
a lot harder. I also did got into contact with strange .htc files which
fixes as example transparency in PNG on IE6, and in some cases used
DirectX filters to fix other compatibility issues. It was also the time
of CSS3Pie and a lot of Modernizr checks for compatibility. Why we did
got this type of issues I think the frontend development did not got
easier, it is even harder with getting into it with all this package managers
and build tools around today.
Over the years at MASSIVE ART we did switch through a lot of build tools
over the time. After Codekit there was Grunt, then there was
Gulp, I think there was even one project with yeoman,
we then used browserify and ended up with webpack.
And beside npm at that time was node only, it was used bower
to manage the frontend dependencies, before npm
and then later yarn was used. I still think
PHP created the only great dependency manager, how it works with git repositories
and how easy it is to create and include forks. The JS ecosystem is today
a real mess as they can not decide for a dependency manager there are
a lot beside npm, there is yarn, but also yarn@2 and yarn@3 which
are different, today there is also pnpm and it would not take long
we will hear about a new one.
Why I did program CSS without following a specific paradigm, best match was
maybe SMACSS without knowing it actually.
I did stumble some time ago over ITCSS
from Harry Roberts, which I did later mix with BEM and Objects from
"Rethinking Design Practices" from Mark Dalgleish. I finally got a way
of writing CSS which did feel good for me.
Read more about here.
But the most important rule I learned over the years in CSS is a component
should never define the space outside of it. That way you avoid a lot of side
effects and responsibility of spacing is part of the parent component, which
make the things a lot easier to place.
But back to the past, better said back to the year 2013.
In the year 2013 so after 1 year I worked at MASSIVE ART they decided to rewrite the CMS from stretch on a modern new technology stack. In the end of summer 2013 the first lines of the new Content Management System named "Sulu" was written. It was decided to switch from the Zend Framework to Symfony (at that time Symfony 2.6). The frontend stack of the was created with Backbone.js and Aura. I was not involved a lot in that part as at that state I was working in another team. Still I did wrote many parts of the MediaBundle, which crimes I did write there are still there today (God help us, we should rewrite that part soon!).
Why Symfony was mostly the best decision we did make, the decision to build on aura js wasn't. So if you never heard about it, it is because it died before ever reaching a 1.0 version. Still it was used and is still used in Sulu 1.x and does its job.
At the time the so new "Sulu Team" was building the companies next CMS and I got into a new project called stickermanager.com. It is an exchange platform for panini football stickers and other stickers.
The technology stack was very interesting, I did first got into contact with Websockets, and even did write my first lines of code in GoLang. We used the Beego framework to provide APIs which could called by PHP which will forward data to the client via there Websocket connection to the Go Server. If we would today do the project, we even would not have to implement that concept ourselves in GoLang, instead we would just use the Mercure for this which uses similar concepts. The frontend stack was not less interesting, it was our first project with React, we decided at that time go with a flux state management library called alt js. In this project we also had the first time to deal with millions of data and compare them to each other.
Beside another colleague, I did work here together with Thomas Schedler which did have the lead in this project. He was at that time the Software Architect and Team Leader of Sulu CMS. I remember he did a lot of research about how to deal with the data, even tried using Elasticsearch, because of our near connection to crate.io. At the end the solution which still runs, is simple bitmask operation on MySQL level which was the most performant way.
Why the project wasn't easy, with a lot of different challenges, it marks also a milestone in my career. Beside that I learned a lot in that project, it also defines the time were I got my foot into the door of the Sulu Team.
The project still is only and runs, I also think the designer Philipp Gabl did do a great job on the project then still after 8 years it looks great and modern, from my point of view.
In the browsers dev tools console still some easter egg can be found. A hint to list the team members which created the project. I think on of the only easter eggs I ever added to a project. I think we should do this kind of things more often, to make development more fun:
On our first hackday specially for Sulu and the Symfony CMF, I decided to bring another feature which we did had in our old ZOOLU CMS to the Sulu ecosystem. It was the first version of the SuluFormBundle which was later moved from my personal Github Namespace to the official Sulu Namespace. It was even some discussion if it should stay open source or not, but it did and now it is still there.
The next big project after Stickermanager which I was involved with the Sulu Team were projects for a german publisher of magazines. In this project we created the SuluArticleBundle mostly created by our Elasticsearch Hero and loud laughing colleague Johannes. The projects requirements with the need of thousands of articles the decision was made to use Elasticsearch here as additional view layer, because PHPCR was not the best storage for this amount of data. As the client was very welcome to open source the SuluArticleBundle could be open sourced and also used for free by others.
Why we are creating currently an Elasticsearch free version of the Article Bundle the history of the Article Bundle should be known before judge the requirements here.
We created for the same client a new version of one of their websites called kuechengoetter.de. Which did also bring the next Bundle to the Sulu Ecosystem, the SuluCommunityBundle. Which I did also work on. Why it is not longer used on that website, we still work with this client and improve this and other websites for them. So more and more I did not only work on client projects but could also to work to improve our open source projects and ecosystem.
The year 2018 marks another milestone, the Sulu team was not longer a team inside the MASSIVE ART Agency. With the begin of October 2018 my official employer switch on my papers from MASSIVE ART to the new created "Sulu GmbH".
It was a new journey, be part again of a small company, trying to stand on its own feeds. One of the reasons why I did start working at MASSIVE ART was that liked the small company feeling. And with Sulu we were again in that small company feeling. We even got our own office, it was just 3 houses beside MASSIVE ART but got us into this startup like feeling. Which I must say I still miss some days this Office.
In October - November 2018 it was the first time I did got into contact with Redis I mean not using redis as a key value cache for saving caches or sessions over some abstraction. Really work with Redis and what it can do. It is really a Swiss Army Knife, with Redis 5 they added a new data type "Streams" this new data type allowed to use messages like system over Redis. At that case the symfony/messenger component was very new and in an experimental state. We decided to implement our own transport which did instead of the current supported amqp use redis streams to transport messages. We open sourced it under handcraftedinthealps/RedisTransportBundle.
The december 2018 marks my first visit on a "real" conference. Before I was just on some local meetups or local conferences. It was the year of the Symfony Con in Lisbon. I which did never travel a lot to other cities it was a great journey to travel to this big city, listen to great talks, drink some beers with other developers and have a hackday with people you just know before from Github profile picture.
At that state I did already do some small pull requests to Symfony framework which we used in our Sulu CMS. But I never thought about what did land in my inbox in 2019. An invitation from the Symfony Team to the EU FOSSA Hackathon in Brussel. The hackathon was sponsored by the EU Commission and a small group of contributes and core team member were invited to Brussel to hack on Symfony and its Ecosystem together. So in April 2019 I was able to attend a hackathon with a lot of great people and open source heros. Traveling to Brussel with some great developers from the well known switzerland company Liip. I was able to work there to bring the Redis Transport we created already as own bundle into the Symfony Core. And with a lot of support, specially thanks here to Tobias Nyholm who always had an open ear for me, I was able to finish that task. With the split in Symfony 6 into an own symfony package I can even see on the packagist site of symfony/redis-messenger site that even the last 30 days about ~800000 installation of that package were made and its usage is growing. Still a lot of other great developers improved it, but I'm happy I could made such a contribution to the Symfony Ecosystem and so made the fundamental with a lot of help of others for all future usages of Redis Streams in the Symfony Ecosystem.
Beside my own steps into open source community of Symfony. It was also great to see
the Sulu Community growing. Helping other developers using Sulu in our Slack channel
was always a pleasure for me. It was also great over the years see a lot of other
developers which were not part of the core team trying to help others there. I was
always strict about the usage of Slack Thread feature in our slack channel. This
way I think we got a good community together and make sure also if it take some
times that almost every question will be answered.
A year before in 2017 it was also another big change for Sulu. A new major version was
planned. As the frontend libraries with Backbone.js and Aura was not state of the
art, the new major version was focus on rewriting the whole frontend code of Sulu
CMS. The frontend rewrite was lead by the great danrot.
It was completely rewritten on a new stack with React and Mobx,
a stack which we are still happy with it 4 years later. I personally had not todo
much with the rewrite of the frontend, but could work on some small improvements
for the backend code. Over the years then I focus to keep Sulu and its ecosystem
always up to date with the current PHP and Symfony versions. That means not only
working on the Sulu core but also keep dependencies of Sulu up to date and working
with the latest versions. The 2.0 version of Sulu was finally released at 2nd October 2019,
with a new fresh UI.
In 2018 a got another opportunity, with a group of developers from MASSIVE ART I was able to attend courses for preparation for the Symfony 4 Certification. Andreas Hucks from Sensio Labs Germany (today QOSSMIC) did in the courses teach as all about what he knows about PHP, HTTP Protocol, Symfony and Symfony Components / Framework.
In this case I can recommend for every Web Developer to read once the HTTP Protocol Specification. It is not as long as somebody think, but it contains the fundamental basics what we are doing every day. The courses ends, end we had still possible attend preparing tests over the sensio labs university one month. Still I could not get over my exam anxiety and did not give the real test a try.
More than 1 and a half year later (12. June 2020) I got some motivation, bought myself a coupon code to do the certification. The motivation was from short time and it took me another year, shortly before the coupon expires (basically on the last minute) to attend the test.
I was happy as after not giving it a try for about 2,5 year I could remove it from my list at 12. June 2021. I even got to rank myself as a Symfony 5 Expert. Still the best part was to finally had done it.
The last year I did try to create some blog posts, mostly just to experiment with different things and free my mind of the ideas going around in my head. I'm using Github as a platform for it. So I can provide also directly working code examples with my blog post. All blogs can be found here under https://github.com/topics/alexander-schranz-article. In September 2021 I got out of the nowhere the opportunity to write a real article for the german PHP Magazine from Entwickler.de. After some discussion I decided to write an article about the new Symfony Runtime Component in combination with the PHP Runtime Project. Where I did use roadrunner, swoole and other alternative possibilities to run PHP applications. The full article is available on their website, under the great title The future is now!.
Ten years did go faster than I ever thought. Web development did change a lot, I would not be sure if something like Tailwind CSS would be accepted 10 years ago. While sending HTML over ajax request where normally 10 years ago, then was bad practices and were replaced with json APIs, HTML over ajax is now coming back with Turbo. Something like React did stay longer then I ever thought and hopefully will be continued this way. JavaScript did make a big shift in the last 10 years first from function pattern like Revealing Pattern which I did prefer, to then classes and now back to functions but into complete direction of functional programming. What I definitely learned there are a lot of different paradigm, think the best example you currently see in the PHP Community with Symfony vs. Laravel. They have totally different paradigm, where I definitely on the Symfony side here because Laravel is too much magic/shortcuts for me, I don't think that Laravel is a bad Framework. I think always people should use what they are most familiar with and what they have fun to work with. That is also something we follow with Sulu CMS, that we want to give 100% freedom how somebody create there website with Sulu and is not force to a specific JS or frontend library.
At work we are currently preparing the next release for Sulu, which I'm currently working on bringing Symfony 6 support to our core. The milestone for 2.5 also looks promising we are working on bringing 2FA to the Admin, Password Policy and Copy Block functionality. As mention above I did the last year write some blogs. There is currently one blog which is still work in progress the Hexagonal Architecture Study or how I did call it Project Rabbit Hole it is a bigger experiment which I want to create basic example build on top of Hexagonal Architecture using different Frameworks and so should show the advantages of this paradigm. Beside I did spend last year a lot of time on my side project, a project which idea I did had about 3-4 years ago. The project should detect any visual changes on website and show the differences and changes, and so should detect any unwanted side effects. Beside that I'm also analyzing any Core Web Vitals for performance changes and HTML for accessibility problems. I did so spend a lot of time also with the Hetzner Cloud because stability is very important when creating this kind of statistics. Why the project is for testing currently online on my old website domain I hopefully can bring it online under its own name the next months. And what is coming then we will see.
At the end of this blog post I want to send a big thank-you.
First I want to thank Stephanie Engstler for the beautiful Illustration and for always helping and supporting me.
Next I want to thank all my colleagues at Sulu. Thomas for always pushing me to try out new things and show us new technologies. Johannes who is fast as hell and an always happy person, joking around still in bad situations. Luca his fast learning and progress to watch was such great and still likes writing JS still after hearing me a lot moan about it. Daniel M being a great all rounder and keeping a straight happy face whatever task he had todo. Niklas which strictness to consistency did improve my quality a lot. Also his calm manner is always refreshing. Another thx goes here to my former colleague Daniel R which was always available for an after-work beer at his time at Sulu and corrected all my english mistakes.
Thank you MASSIVE ART which did make this even possible. Without them, I would not be sitting here as a web developer working with great people together and writing this article.
I would like to thank everyone I have worked with. I know I was not always the easiest person to work with, but I enjoyed every project we finished and every after work beer we had drank together. Looking forward for some more ;)
Cheers Alex
