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The decline of PHP?

The Corinthian · 2012-01-16 10:24:37

I came across the following interesting statistics courtesy of the Tiobe Index, which polls frequency of online mention of languages. Given the rise in popularity in mobile development, it's hardly surprising that languages such as Objective-C are rising in popularity (with both Java and C# also benefiting from their use…

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#32 19-01-2012 12:33pm
The Corinthian

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georgiecasey wrote: »

That's fine advice to become an analyst, whatever work that entails but how do you get it?

As a freelancer you have to be a bit of a Jack of all trades. This means that you are not simply the developer/programmer, but also have to deal with all the stages of the project. The analysis and design phases of a project are those at the beginning of a project; understanding what the client wants, breaking down and distilling this into requirements and then translating this into an architecture and specification.

In other words, if you've freelanced, you've already taken a step towards being an analyst.

Specializing in this would mean becoming more proficient in the methodologies associated with analysis. It also realistically means that you will begin to farm out the actual coding work as you concentrate on bringing in more contracts and the initial stages of a project, leading to a loss in earnings from that area but an increase because you will be able to handle multiple projects simultaneously. However the largest advantage is that it is a job that, due to it being client facing, cannot really be outsourced.

As to how you get it? The same way any freelancer gets work in. You simply apply a slightly different business model and strategy is all.

Completely off topic, but yeah, it's about 10 to 30 SQL inserts, each product attribute is a different row, EAV is a headwreck but very flexible to add features you need to your shopping cart site.

This has always been the problem with using out-of-the-box solutions. However flexible they are, more often than not there will be a requirement that cannot be easily catered for.

My old boss, about 13 years ago, got stuck on our adopting a WYSIWYG called Drumbeat. It was a pretty powerful application in that it allowed one to not only develop CSS based interfaces (which were still pretty new) but database backed ASP sites. You would 'develop' the site using the WYSIWYG, and then 'compile' it into the necessary scripts and other assets.

Before long requirements began to appear that Drumbeat could not easily, or at all, handle. This led to a 'hack file' - essentially a text file full of custom code and changes that would have to be manually added every time the site was 'compiled'. After two projects that ended up eating up all our time finding and implementing such 'hacks' we stopped using it and returned to bespoke development.

Such applications, nowadays, are far more powerful and flexible. However they still ultimately suffer the same limitations and it is being able to avoid those limitations that will differentiate a freelancer from the bulk of those who cannot. And it is that differentiation that will bring in contracts that you would otherwise not be able to take on and charge rates that the market would otherwise not allow you to charge.

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