Getting an introduction to PHP was different, as we were both not using Codecademy, and also have the benefit of already having a JavaScript background. Being familiar with the terminology was supremely helpful, and in many ways, I preferred the simplicity of PHP. It seems that everything I need to do uses fewer characters than in JavaScript. 

However, learning on the learn-php.org forced me to go a little bit slower. There were terms and references I didn’t understand from the get-go, which turned out to be a blessing because it led me to further research. The site initially referred to PHP, Python, Ruby etc. as “MVC based web frameworks,” which I had to look up. I still don’t quite understand how the framework operates — MVC stands for Model-View-Controller — but I was able to understand in concept that the “model” is essentially the underlying information of a webpage, and the “view” is the UI (User Interface). The controller is the logic and another actionable language that interacts between the model and the view.

Another concept that I ran into and didn’t understand was the idea of “zero-based indices.” Research revealed that this concept simply means that any initial element of a sequence starts at zero instead of one. The concept is common among programming languages. The lesson also referenced Perl, which I had not heard of but quickly found out was just another programming language.

For my profile, I talked with Ryan Schneiderman who is an up-and-coming web developer who recently hand-coded a website for his father, a prominent photographer. He used several technologies that I had little prior exposure to but found very interesting. He used a Python-based web framework called Django (which is an MVC-model!) to build the site, and hosted the data-rich images on Amazon Web Services.

Because the site was very image-heavy and used a lot of sliders, he used a method to allow the page to load all the images in a slider first so that the site didn’t need to load a large image whenever a user moved to the next slide.

Schneiderman, who is a high school basketball coach, is also developing a web and mobile application for coaches to plan and design plays.