With the internet melting over the PHP2Shell vulnerability, seeing PHP all over the news actually brings me back to great times. If not for PHP, I might never have started my software development career. I was 16 or 17, making pocket money freelancing and doing ⁠psd2html⁠ work (yes, the kind of tasks you can now vibecode in 5 minutes). One of my customers asked me if I knew PHP. "Of course," I said... Well, I didn’t. Back then, my internet wasn't even fast enough to download a local server or the documentation. So I went to a store, bought a physical CD with PHP on it (photo of the CD attached!), and opened up the manual. Fortunately, I had a printer at home, so I printed out about 100 A4 pages of PHP syntax and documentation. That weekend, I had to take a train to the countryside to visit my grandma. I took that stack of 100 pages with me and read it the entire train ride - and kept reading at my grandma's house, since there was literally nothing else to do there besides hugging her and having a quick catch-up. Two days later, I came back home, pinged my client on ICQ, and said: "Give me more details about this PHP project of yours." And just like that, my software engineering career began. Things snowballed quickly from there: Later that same year, I landed my first full-time PHP developer job at Warecorp and spent a couple of years there as a Lead PHP Developer, largely because my English was good enough to talk directly to American clients. Next, I joined Oxagile (which is where the team photo is from!). Our whole PHP crew decided to get officially certified together, and we all passed our Zend PHP certifications. From there, I moved to EPAM. At the time, EPAM was heavily focused on massive Java enterprise projects and didn't really have a PHP practice. I ended up leading a team of ~20 PHP developers, building high-traffic platforms for MTV Entertainment - including MTV dot com, UFC, and Comedy Central. I had no idea back then where it would all lead, but following what genuinely sparks your curiosity pays off if you just keep showing up and building on that path. P.S. Speaking of PHP... it’s probably a great time to go update your WordPress blogs. 😉