n3rd.org

Whoohooo, I’m now officially a Zend Certified Engineer. Besides looking nice on my application it was actually a pretty good exercise and preparation for my upcoming job interviews. I wouldn’t say it was particularly hard but you definitely need to prepare yourself, if only to know what kind of questions to expect. And I did learn a thing or two, some more useful than others (there is a function called strspn? Really?).
One could argue that quizzing people about the behaviour of particular functions isn’t really all that meaningful. After all, that’s the kind of stuff you can look up in the docs should need be. But then again, this is a PHP-specific certification and not one about your general ability to program. With that in mind it actually makes sense to ask some rather pedantic questions about PHP.

I’ve thought rather long and hard about what kind of jobs I should be applying for. I’ve worked with PHP, Java, C# and C++ and although PHP definitely has its quirks and shortcomings I do have a somewhat masochistic love/hate-relationship with it. It’s just a fun language. So for that reason I’ve been looking for a job as a PHP developer and it seems that there are plenty of openings and the offers are slowly trickling in. This is a very exciting time and I believe you can make or break quite a lot with your first job. Let’s see how things turn out, wish me luck.