So, can you tell me a little about “Immerse”?
Sure, I’m 34 years old and live in The Netherlands. I work for a small company where we build high performance, high security web-sites and web-based applications. I like to spend my spare time at my PC, but also enjoy regular stuff like watching movies, visiting friends and family, reading and playing video games. 
Your job sounds cool. Given the high-security and high performance aspects, are there any technologies you’ve come across that you’ve found challenging or interesting?
As far as high-performance goes we’ve been using technologies such as Solr and MongoDB quite a bit lately. Using these technologies is great because it means we no longer need to use PHP and MySQL to do faceted searches (which is tricky at best) but that searches now take only milliseconds. MongoDB is useful as a super-fast key-value store which we use for logging and statistics. My colleague Gijs is always finding new and interesting technologies to use, and if we find a tool that fits a job, we use it.
As far as security goes, it’s less exciting: we simply make sure everything is escaped correctly whenever it should be escaped, that there is a good permissions system in place and that critical functionality can only by accessed by people who should be able to access it. Pretty much common sense, really, but the kind of common sense you get after years of building applications and by learning from your mistakes.
You’ve been a member for nearly 5 years now; can you tell us how you found SitePoint and what has made you stick around?
I found SitePoint through Google when I was trying to find information about something PHP-related. I was very much a beginner back then, and the members at SitePoint helped out a lot when I started out. What made me stick around was the friendly atmosphere and the high level of knowledge. Also, I enjoy helping people who are starting out with programming for the web to solve their coding problems - SitePoint is the nicest place I’ve ever found to do so.
You’re a regular in the PHP forum here at SitePoint, often advocating clean code and best practice, how do you find the level of knowledge there?
There are really three levels of knowledge on offer in the PHP forum. The beginners, who are usually there to get a little help. On the next level are the experienced programmers, who have built a whole bunch of sites and applications, are self-taught and/ or work with PHP every day. The last/ highest level is found in the PHP Application Design forum, where the level of knowledge is incredibly high and people really know their stuff. I group myself with the middle level: I have quite a bit of experience, but lacking any formal programming training I don’t always understand/ follow the more abstract conversations about OO programming. Personally, I believe in using the right tools for the job and keeping it simple, safe and fast – I try to share that mindset with others on the forums.
What would you tell somebody to help them become a better developer?
Just the standard answers:
- Don’t be afraid to ask for help
- Don’t be afraid to receive criticism
- Practice! Practice! Practice!
- Try to practice on a ‘real’ project, something you or other people actually use.
Trying to write interesting code that you never use might teach some new concepts, but writing code that you actually need to update, maintain and expand is much more educational.
Finally, I noticed you’re developing a PHP based CMS named Fruml; can you tell us what motivated you develop this? (link)
While I was teaching myself PHP from a book, I worked at a bank where we used a very expensive ASP based content management system. At the same time, a friend needed some help building a site, and I made a ‘secret’ page where he could log in to edit the content. It was all very simple, but I kept expanding it, feeling I could create something on par with (or even better than) the commercial package I was used to using, certainly easier to use and with more possibilities. From that, my first CMS was born, which was at that time pretty successful, doing about 3000 downloads per month during the height of its popularity. I left the project after a while to pursue other interests. Sometime last year ‘that itch’ returned, and I started work on Fruml, using modern technologies and skills I’ve learned over the last couple of years. It’s still very much in beta, but so far the response is very positive and I’m enjoying working on the system a lot. Currently I’m implementing a design made by my good friend Maz, it’s going to look so beautiful! As for motivation, it’s still the same as all those years ago: I want a system that I can use to do what I want, and not to do what the system thinks I should be doing.
That’s brilliant Alex, thank you for your time and congratulations!
