Joshua Weaver

My experience with php started with wordpress front end development and evolved through working with other php cms's like expression engine to what I do today, which is more backend php code. Most of the applications I'm in charge of maintaining are written with Laravel. Much of my focus with PHP is writing maintainable code, which means favoring OOP practices over the older functional styles of php when possible. I've really enjoyed the way php has evolved over recent years with using composer for autoloading and the support for traits, interfaces and other OOP tools that other languages enjoy.

This is a newer area for me, but over the last year and some change I've been responsible for developing parts of an angular 1 application that services over 20 universities in the United States. My work on that project served as a trial by fire and I learned a LOT through it. Recently I've begun work on porting that codebase to angular 2, so I'm also familiar with the angular 2 syntax.

CSS was one of the first things I learned when I got into programming, so I'm very comfortable on the front end. The majority of my work experience has been in front end development jobs. Over the last 4 years or so I've worked with Sass as well, which really helps to organize larger codebases and handle things like cross browser compatibility etc.

My database of choice is Postgres, however, I also frequently work with mysql. At my day job we have an enterprise Java application with a Postgres backend, and I have to be able to write queries that follow many levels of relationships as well as queries to manipulate data based on complex conditionals. In some cases its necessary to involve advanced capabilities like window functions. I'm also familiar with how Postgres master/slave WAL file shipping works, although I've never had to set that up myself.

I really like laravel because it takes the pain out of programming! It lets you focus on delivering value to your client instead of spending hours on configuration. I've written several applications for production use in Laravel, and its ease of use to me are unparalleled.

I use Git on a day in day out basis and am really comfortable with it. Every day use of add, commit, push, as well as some not so common uses. One example is forking our own version of the Laravel Homestead repository and setting up multiple origins so we can pull in changes from the official repo and merge them with our custom code.