OpenLampTech - Developer Interview With Christian Olear
OpenLampTech - Developer Interview With Christian Olear
Long-time web developer Christian Olear shares an insightful developer interview with the OpenLampTech newsletter readers.
Welcome to this OpenLampTech text-based developer interview.
Spanning two-plus decades, Christian Olear has programmed using Laravel, the Zend framework, and Symfony to name just a few, in addition to vanilla PHP.
Nowadays, Christian focuses mostly on his no-code web crawling and scraping SaaS tool, crwl.io.
Needless to say, Christian has a lot of knowledge in the web development industry and shares some fantastic content with the OpenLampTech newsletter readers.
And now without any further ado, on to the interview.
Q: Please introduce yourself and tell us what you currently do for a living.
Hey! I am Christian Olear, a.k.a. otsch, a Web Developer and Founder from Austria. I've been self-employed for a year now, focusing on crwl.io, a no-code web crawling and scraping SaaS tool, based on my open-source library crwlr.software. While the SaaS tool is currently still in closed beta, there are already a few paying customers and I'm working hard to bring it to a public launch soon. Additionally, I offer services as a freelancer, building custom crawlers/scrapers, and sometimes working on other projects.
Q: What PHP framework(s) and/or CMS(s) are you interested in the most or currently using (if any) and why?
I primarily use Laravel due to its simplicity and the huge ecosystem. Occasionally, I use single Symfony components as well. I have been coding in PHP for over two decades, during which I've also worked with Zend Framework, and even on projects that were not using a framework at all. Fortunately, those days are over. For APIs, I also worked with Slim and Laravel Lumen in the past, but today I also just use Laravel for this.
Q: Do you think it is important for developers to know some SQL and not rely solely on an ORM? Why or why not?
Yes! Especially if you are working on larger projects with large databases and high traffic. You can tune your app performance a lot if you know, for example, which indexes to create. I would also recommend having a good understanding of SQL for the case of an emergency on your production database. Or maybe you will have to clean up some data inconsistencies after you had a bug in your application at some point. There are more and more tools out there, helping you deal with databases, but it's always good to have some good old SQL knowledge.
Q: What is one piece of software that you just cannot live without and why?
That's Docker for me. Especially for local development, but also for having the same environment locally and in production. It made everything so much easier.
Back in the days there was shared hosting with the LAMP stack pre-installed. And for local development, you used MAMP (/WAMP/LAMP/XAMPP). I know people still do that 😅, which is OK. But for a lot of us things got more complex over time. Nginx entered the stage as a more resource-efficient server. The introduction of various services and databases like Redis, RabbitMQ, and Elasticsearch made a lot of things possible or easier, but they also added complexity. And Docker saved the day IMO. Working on multiple different projects using different services, with different configurations is so much easier using Docker! For me, Docker is the most fundamental piece of my daily development work.
Q: You type all of your code in which IDE/Text Editor/Software?
I am a big fan of PhpStorm. More than two decades ago I started using Macromedia Dreamweaver 😅 and over time I used Netbeans, Coda, Atom, Sublime and there were certainly a few more. But PhpStorm finally was a revelation for me. I know VS Code is nice too, but PhpStorm, for me, is worth every penny. I still use Sublime for taking notes and opening huge files, but for coding, there's only PhpStorm!
Q: How has working as a web developer/designer/professional benefited you other than the obvious paycheck and monetary value?
Oh, that's a good question! I would say I've had the pleasure of meeting many great people and exploring beautiful cities at meetups, conferences, and hackathons. There are also some friendships that wouldn't exist if I hadn't chosen this profession.
Q: Do you have a book, newsletter, blog, podcast, or other resource you would recommend to other developers?
I rarely read coding-related books, mostly because they become outdated very fast. But an evergreen that I'd recommend to anyone is Clean Code by Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob).
I also regularly have a look at Freek Van der Herten's Newsletter/Blog. His Newsletter is also a curated list of interesting articles from the whole community.
I follow what Brent Roose is publishing (stitcher.io Blog, PHP Annotated on YouTube). I often check the PHP Annotated Blog/Newsletter by his jetbrains colleague Roman Pronskiy.
On YouTube I also sometimes watch videos by Laravel Daily (Povilas Korop), Aaron Francis, Christoph Rumpel, Steve McDougall (/King), and many more.
Q: What hobbies or activities do you do for fun?
In my free time, I enjoy attending concerts, watching movies, reading books, and staying active through swimming.
Q: Where can readers go to learn more about you and any projects you may have going?
You will find everything on my personal website otsch.codes. You can also follow me on twitter, mastodon, bluesky (you see I'm prepared for the end of twitter 😅 and no, I will never stop calling it twitter!) github and LinkedIn.
Q: Anything else you'd like to add or share with the OpenLampTech readers?
Not really. Let's hope AI won't replace us! 🤞🏻😅
Thanks for reading!
Thank you, Christian Olear, for sharing your knowledge and insights with the OpenLampTech newsletter readers and community!
Thank you for reading. I hope you have a great rest of your week.
Take care.
Josh Otwell