Nick Brown nick-brown

Breaking into Web Development

I work as an analyst contractor, these days my roles are often a mixture of development and management. I have been asked by a countless number of people what they need to do to get the jobs I’m offered – and it’s simpler than most expect. The market for talented developers in the United Kingdom (and in many talent-lite communities around the world) is such that anyone who merely knows what they are doing has a very good chance of getting a job. Even a job contracting (which ordinarily has senior-level requirements).

To become a web developer with a good salary and employment expectations you need skills. Below I’ll provide a plan to get you towards the top of the largest market: PHP Web Development. Advanced knowledge of everything on this list would immediately make you one of the best, so just strive to have an exposure if not a comprehensive understanding (though the *starred points are essential). To learn these technologies you should use several in combination on on

Latency numbers every programmer should know

L1 cache reference ......................... 0.5 ns
Branch mispredict ............................ 5 ns
L2 cache reference ........................... 7 ns
Mutex lock/unlock ........................... 25 ns
Main memory reference ...................... 100 ns             
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy ............. 3,000 ns  =   3 µs
Send 2K bytes over 1 Gbps network ....... 20,000 ns  =  20 µs
SSD random read ........................ 150,000 ns  = 150 µs

Read 1 MB sequentially from memory ..... 250,000 ns = 250 µs

	var libpath = require('path');
	var http = require('http');
	var fs = require('fs');
	var url = require('url');
	var bind_port = 8001;
	var path = "/path/to/your/base_directory/";

	http.createServer(function (request, response) {
	var uri = url.parse(request.url).pathname;
	var filename = libpath.join(path, uri);

	<?php die('This file is not really here!');

	/**
	* ------------- DO NOT UPLOAD THIS FILE TO LIVE SERVER ---------------------
	*
	* Implements code completion for CodeIgniter in phpStorm
	* phpStorm indexes all class constructs, so if this file is in the project it will be loaded.
	* -------------------------------------------------------------------
	* Drop the following file into a CI project in phpStorm
	* You can put it in the project root and phpStorm will load it.

	echo 'export PATH=$HOME/local/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc
	. ~/.bashrc
	mkdir ~/local
	mkdir ~/node-latest-install
	cd ~/node-latest-install
	curl http://nodejs.org/dist/node-latest.tar.gz \| tar xz --strip-components=1
	./configure --prefix=~/local
	make install # ok, fine, this step probably takes more than 30 seconds...
	curl https://www.npmjs.org/install.sh \| sh