Sunday, March 9, 2008

SWSX Meetup; Which cert for PHP types

We had the Meetup in Austin featuring Zack Urlocker on March 9th. He was in Austin for the South By Southwest Festival. Part of SWSX was Sun's sponsored concert by Seven Mary Three and the Smithereens. Plus there was the added bonus of meeting members of the local community and SWSX conference attendees. And it was a good opportunity for the Texas MySQL-ers to gather together. Long story short is that we had a great meal, met some very nice people from Sun, and head lots of great music. Look for the Sun/MySQL Meetup/Mashup near you. The people are great and the events are a lot of fun!

--

I was asked which is a better certification for the 'average' PHP developer : The Developer or DBA? Most of the PHP shops I know of (or have employed me) are very small and one person has to cover a lot of territory. This brings us to a 'which came first, the chicken or the egg' type dilemma. Do you follow the strict developers tract and learn to squeeze all you can out of your schema or a DBA path to keep your servers running at the peak of performance? In a small shop, you are going to probably be responsible for both.

I would recommend the DBA certification first followed by the Developer. It is easier to write good code in a properly running environment than in a situation where you can not tell if your code or the sever is at fault.

No comments: