PHP

Even though I started my career with (embedded) C, somehow, PHP always keeps returning. Granted, it's not the sexiest language, and there is a lot of hate for it. But I find that PHP used the right way, can solve many problems with as much ease as any other language. But programming in PHP takes as much effort and knowledge as programming in any different language. You always balance on a fine line between getting things done & getting things pretty.

Symfony Framework

Symfony is one of those frameworks that didn't start from scratch but asked the question: what are the things that make other frameworks function? This all resulted in Symfony (2 and above), which takes the best of other frameworks like Spring and Django. It can be used for small apps to large web applications running multiple services without sacrificing anything in SOLID practices.

Go

Go is a language that makes sense. It's often coined as "a better C," but realistically, it's way more than C. A lot of system administration and container orchestration is written in Go nowadays, which gives you a large infrastructure of libraries that already have solved the problems you are facing.

Ranging from monitoring systems that run as watchdogs to reporting engines that need to collect information from a large number of data endpoints, writing it in Go makes it a simple job.

Python

If PHP is my first love, then Python is the second one. Even though I still love working in Python (most of the time for writing AWS Lambda functions), it starting to fade away to the background.

I've written a book about moving from Python from a PHP perspective, explaining many of the Python language, infrastructure, and idioms commonly used.

Java, C

You haven't done Java if you haven't done Java Applets. It made a fascinating time in which a single codebase and GUI could be run on both Unix and Windows machines. I still have the books on writing GUI's with AWT.

Even though I don't use it anymore professionally, it's one of those languages I try to keep up with. Funny enough to see that a lot of functionality from Java is gradually getting implemented in other languages like PHP.

Besides Java, C (not so much C++ though), is one of those languages I love. I've written many applications in pure C, which nowadays would be much easier to use other languages for. But try and write a multi-platform library for 14 different Unix-flavours AND supporting windows at the same time (no, Cygwin doesn't count).

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Experience working on AWS platforms ranging from small $1K to large $100K+ monthly budgets. This includes working with both ECS, EKS, and the majority of components that AWS provides.

Optimizing costs is one of the things I enjoy spending time on. Especially in larger organizations, there is a tendency not to clean up resources or not to re-evaluate the current resources, which can result in spending more money than needed.

Even though I like using AWS, I do not like the whole "move everything to the cloud" part. By this, I mean, I've seen organizations moving everything to lambda functions, which in turn trigger other components, which triggers different lambda's, etc., so you end up with a big mess that is hard to debug. Knowing when NOT to use cloud-components is probably an essential job as an engineer, as it is to understand how to use those components.

Kubernetes

Most of the Kubernetes clusters I've set up are based on Kops. They range from small testing clusters to multi-cluster systems that automatically deploy new microservices with the help of CI/CD streets.

Even though Kubernetes solves many problems in container orchestration, it also adds other problems. Before implementation, I usually research and advice organisations on whether implementing would be even beneficial or not.

CI/CD

With the help of Continuous Integration and Deployment, it makes moving a feature of issue from idea to production much easier, safer and faster. I have a lot of experience moving small and large development environments to a fully automated CI/CD environment. This could be Jenkins, Drone.io, CodeDeploy or (my favourite) GitLab CI/CD.