Hi, I'm Phil Freo

I had a few goals for this summer away from school.  I wanted to go to some tech conferences, check out more startups and web companies in both Silicon Valley and closer to home in Florida, and continue with my freelance development work.  I also decided I wanted to take the Zend PHP 5 Certification test to learn more, see what I know, and to separate myself from every other kid who thinks they know PHP.

By the way, the thing I hate about PHP most is that, because it’s so easy to get started with, you can’t immediately differentiate between people who really know PHP (with a solid understanding of security issues, scalability, MVC, object-oriented programming, design patterns, etc.) and people who know just enough to be dangerous.  I’ve seen way too many websites written with PHP and HTML scattered together, SQL injection vulnerabilities, lack of code reusability, etc. This problem isn’t specific to PHP only, but I find the percentage of novice PHP developers to be far worse than, say, Ruby or Python developers.

So I looked through the “php|architect’s Zend PHP 5 Certification” study guide for the last couple days and took an online practice test.  I actually learned a lot of interesting things about PHP that I didn’t know – so it was a good experience.

Today I took the exam at a local testing center and am happy to announce that I am officially a PHP 5 Zend Certified Engineer (ZCE).

By the way, if you’re looking to hire a good PHP developer, let me know (resume is here).  I graduate in December 2009.