Earlier today, Juan Treminio sent out this tweet, and I injected myself into the conversation.

Been trying to use a Windows desktop for web development for a week now. This is pretty painful, even with cygwin + vagrant

— Juan Treminio (@juantreminio) July 1, 2015

In honor of the 20th birthday for PHP, my good friend Ben Ramsey has been asking people for stories of how they first got into PHP. It's hard to think that I've been doing PHP for more than ten years at this point, and that is only half of the lifetime of PHP itself.

When I started working with PHP, it was because I was fed up with Perl. I had been building HTML websites for quite a while at that point, and I had already been interested in programming in general. Perl worked, but as anyone who has done work with Perl knows that the syntax is, well... it's Perl. I was working at a local ISP at the time and one of my coworkers, Matt Wiseman pointed me to PHP, so I started to look into it. I liked what I saw.

Once again I find myself sitting in the airport with way to much time on my hands, which means that now is a good time to write down my thoughts on another great conference.

The last few years of development, at least in the PHP world, has been dominated by the idea of quickly and easily duplicating development environments. It is a great problem that a lot of developers, especially PHP, have to face when it comes to building tools to work on specific systems. While it is better than the days of not being sure if you were running PHP 5.1, 5.2, or 5.3 (though that is still a big issue for some people), our web applications are becoming more than a few collective PHP scripts being thrown up on a server. Not only do we need to contend with issues of developer stacks, but we need to make sure that the environments match closely in development as they do production.