I am MJ Convento, a PHP developer in Metro Manila. I have been doing this professionally since 2013 and I am a senior Symfony developer at Talentech Solutions, after a long stretch at Flexisource IT as a senior PHP developer.
The route here was ordinary. I finished B.S. Computer Engineering at Adamson University in 2013 and spent that first year near the hardware, on technical support and machine maintenance. Development started in 2014 with a scheduling system that grew into a full ERP and CRM, which is where I met Symfony: a manufacturing module, a lot of Twig admin panels, and the usual inventory, purchasing and sales screens nobody writes conference talks about. After that came software for a multinational bank, then several years at offshore and outsourcing shops, which is a fast way to see a lot of other people’s codebases.
PHP is the focus and always has been, with MySQL beside it in very nearly every job I have held. Symfony is where I am most comfortable and Laravel is a pleasure when a project suits it. On the front end I went jQuery, then Vue, then React, in that order. I also handle the AWS side, the parts of DevOps a backend developer ends up owning whether or not it says so in the job title.
This blog is where upgrade notes end up. I write a post after a release has been in production long enough to have opinions about it, usually two or three months, which is why nothing here is published on launch day. Everything is dated when it was written, so an old post is an old post, not a quietly rewritten one.
Measurements from servers I work on are labelled as mine. Everything else links to a primary source: the RFC, the changelog, the upgrade guide, the paper. If you find a claim here that a primary source contradicts, tell me and I will correct it in place with a note.