After being a part of the developer hiring process for a while now, I have begun to see what distinguishes an exceptional web developer (the ones that get hired faster than we can even make an offer) and everybody else. Things have changed since 1995 – web development requires actual knowledge of programming!

The problem is that people think web development is somehow easier than other types of development. Nothing is inherently easier about developing an application in PHP than in C++. While I could accuse people who say this as being naive, the truth is that web developers themselves seem to hold this as the truth. In order to excel at being a web developer, one must understand how to develop an application. In other words, there are very different skills required in programming something like Facebook or Digg than for updating Mom’s store website.

First, you must actually understand object oriented programming (OOP). Everybody these days says they “know” OOP. I don’t mean “you read about it in a book” or that you can use a class when necessary; I mean being able to write extensible, modular libraries. This takes time and practice. When people first begin writing classes, they mistake the process for “grouping up functions under one class name in one file.” This is dead wrong and actually counter productive in some cases.

Classes are about automation and simplification. The classic analogy for OOP is a car because it has many parts that make it a whole. But just like the driver has no idea what a crank shaft, piston, or fuel injector does, people using your class should have no idea (nor need to learn why) about the inner workings of your class. All they need to know is that calling one of the few public methods (turn_ignition(), step_on_pedal(), steer()) does a whole lot of cool stuff behind the scenes that makes their life easier. And just like how you wouldn’t want the entire car engine welded together (instead of using bolts and screws), you shouldn’t write humongous class methods that do 1000 things — break it up into digestible parts so that other people can enhance just the pieces they want (see “overloading” below).

When you design a class, you start by listing out things that the class will be used for. Then, you figure out the lowest common denominators between these actions to remove “special, one time cases.” You now have a list of your primary public functions. Everything else in your class should pretty much remain protected or private (discretion is learned with experience). The entire point is that classes are not a group of similar functions, but rather a single conceptual unit.

And when you’re all done with understanding why object oriented programming exists, you must then learn to use Inheritance, and Overloading (some languages) and Interfaces.

Second, you must understand and demonstrate competency with design patterns. At the very least, you should be aware of the Singleton and Factory patterns, which are very commonly used, and for (arguably) good reasons. Knowledge of basic design patterns goes a long way because a time will come when you may need to borrow from one of these concepts when developing your web application. It also means you have a wider exposure to the different types of architectures available to someone writing a library or application.

Last, you must understand scaling issues in growing web applications and how to resolve them. This is probably the rarest trait, but if you have it, you will shine like a rock star. It is important to realize that certain operations are much more costly than others. In today’s world, the CPU is rarely the bottleneck, but there are still bottlenecks. A common instance of this problem is when Word Press blogs go offline because it is slammed by a spike in traffic. That said, the most common type of bottleneck involves the database and often manifests in one of three ways:

Each query sent to the database involves some small amount of lag between the web server and the database server. Hundreds of queries on a page will slow down your page loads. On high traffic pages, one less query means thousands of queries a second. Make sure you learn how to do JOIN statements.

Each query must use an index in the database. Without this index, a query looking at a large table will bottleneck the hard drive (because it has to search large portions of the disk). Learn how to use the MySQL command: explain.

Database tables using MyISAM (instead of InnoDB) risk facing table locking issues. When you run a big or complex update on MyISAM, no other updates can occur on that table until the first one is done. If that table is very large, this may mean someone’s page sits there and loads for a long time (or times out). Typically, one should use a transactional database such as InnoDB.

Other types of common scaling issues are:

Session management on the database instead of letting PHP handle it. This is an issue because any large web application has more than one web server which means when a person hits a new page they might be loading from a different web server each time.

Managing files generated on the server – such as when a user uploads a file. The issue here is that if a file is created on one server (in a cluster of 100), how do the other servers know it exists? Obviously the solution is to somehow centralize this with a synchronization process or store all of the files somewhere else.

How queries can start acting different (much slower) when your tables reach 1M+ rows without proper precautions. Larger tables change things because indexes sometimes stop getting used or slowness that wasn’t apparent before is now very noticeable. (A book could be written here…)

Merely reading and understanding these issues has put you ahead of a bunch of people out there. 🙂

In conclusion, you must re-think the “web developer” as an application developer that happens to work in a browser. I often hear the excuse that these types of advanced concepts can’t be readily applied in small-time applications (such as a simple store-front), but I believe this is simply not true. Virtually every site requires a database connection or a template system (for easy inclusion of header/footer files). Database abstraction and template systems are probably the single best place to use OOP concepts. It simply makes no sense that one would use the raw mysql_query() function in any website, even if it’s just Mom’s baby pictures. Putting these ideas in classes reduces security vulnerabilities and makes development much faster. If the notion of abstracting templates or databases is totally foreign to you, I suggest you start by looking at Smarty or EzSQL.

Happy studying. 🙂