Other developers are not like me. This is something I have to tell myself regularly. I'm reminded of this by the simple numbers for Wordpress usage. 16.3% of websites are powered by Wordpress and it accounts for 54% or the CMS market. While we can argue how these numbers are measured we can't argue that A LOT of websites are built on technology often railed on in tech blogs.

I find this even more interesting when it comes to creating development tools, documenting methods, and advocating use of the new hotness. All too often this happens in the bubble of people who think like us and do thinkings in a similar manner. We wonder why others struggle with what we are suggesting. We wonder why something isn't catching on. Sometimes we even write off these other developers as incompetent because they suggest using some piece of technology we've grown to despise. None the less, they keep trucking along, thinkings change slowly, some camps move further apart, and may good ideas go stale.

Part of the equation we often miss is that other developers are different and how those differences matter. They have different needs. Their customers have different needs. The list of tasks they have to do for their job is different. The priorities they have are different. Understanding these differences can help us make better all around products and move the Internet in a better direction in a healthier manner.

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One of the tips to speed up websites is it minify the JavaScript. It's simple, effective and the major players already do it (except Drupal). In the discussions for Drupal 8 and how we can speed up Drupal 7 we've been talking about how we go about providing minified JavaScript files for browsers and there are two camps. One camp wants to ship minified files and the other wants to minify on the fly. While minifying on the fly would be nice it turns out that this is really hard for Drupal and other CMS systems.

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Github is awesome. I've used it for open source projects and with companies I've worked for. The pull requests, comments, gists, and tools are fantastic. So much so that I'd even go so far as to recommend large enterprises checkout Github enterprise. Despite all of this I find myself happily using Bitbucket for personal projects that aren't open source. There are cases where using Bitbucket just makes sense for me.

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While I was responding to comments on a recent post I had the realization that the motivations I have for choosing the development tools I use are quite different from those others have. I find a little self evaluation to be healthy so I thought I would share what I found when I looked at why I continue to choose PHP as my language of choice.

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With all the new development toys why would someone want to choose PHP for their next new web project? Why would someone choose PHP over node.js or Rails? It's easy to say something is a legacy application in PHP and it's not cost effective to migrate away from it. It's entirely different to choose something for an entirely new project all together. So, here are 4 reasons to consider PHP for a new web project.

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