One man's voice Thoughts, rants and commentary of a simple man

Humble yourself or be ye humbled

Over the last few days I have had the fortune of speaking with several programmers that work deep in the heart of the social networking workspace. These guys are literally in the heat of the happenings every day and are working on some of the coolest problems, technologies and concepts on the web.

And they are absolutely brilliant.

It started out with a high level conversation of my thoughts on PHP and my approach to certain aspects of application development. This conversation, with a fellow named David from New York, was unlike any conversation I have had before on the topic of PHP application development. It was refreshing and intimidating and exciting all at once. David was pretty rad.

Then today I was able to talk with Tim, Jon, Andre and Jeff (please God in heaven tell me this was his name) and I have to tell you, I was blown completely out of the water by their level of knowledge of the subject of programming.

How's your mind? Blown?

For the first time ever in my life I had the opportunity to talk to programming with some folks that live the life daily. These guys are absolutely passionate about what they do and how they do it. They know their stuff and they do not mince their expectation of what a programmer should know.

Quick sidebar: This morning, when I woke up, I thought of myself as a pretty decent PHP programmer. As of tonight I think I would say I am more of a PHP developer.

Why do I say this? Well, for one thing, I was not able to hold my end of the conversation very well at all when it came to some of the more technical aspects of programming in PHP. Simple things that I take for granted every day were brought up in this conversation (rather asked of me how I would do it) and I was not able to think very quickly at all about how I would do these things.

I'll spare you the details of what we talked about, but the sad fact is that when we were done talking I felt like a first month PHP script kiddie that just realized there is a whole universe of capability out there inside this language. Except I now feel this way about programming, web development, servers, HTTP, databases and UI.

Things I thought I knew (and regrettable have even included on my resume) I do not know (or at least I think I may not now). I have never given any consideration as to what the internals of the MySQL server are doing when a certain type of query is being executed. I could not for the life of me recall the major differences between the MyISAM and InnoDB storage engines.

I could not recall how I would go about fixing corrupt data sets programmatically rather than manually manipulating data post facto.

I could not think of how to set up a simple unit test. WHAT THE CARP? How do I not remember how to do that?!?!?!?!

Seriously, after today I felt so NOT like a programmer. I love PHP and development of applications, but tonight I think I am no longer thinking of myself as a professional PHP programmer so much as I am thinking of myself as a work in progress.

There is a lot I need to learn about programming I believe. Not language specific stuff, but the technical stuff that is wrapped around loads, bandwidth, corruption, security, paradigm shifts and the entirety of programming as a whole.

I am humbled. The guys I met today proved to me that I am not near the level I thought I was when it comes to programming. I can develop with the best of them. But programming, well, that is something that I need to start taking a sharper, closer look at.

To David, Tim, Jon, Andre and Jeff, thanks guys. I learned a lot from you today. I do hope one day we might be able to converse again. If for nothing else then so I can see how much more there is to know about things I thought I knew but know now I know very little about.