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From PHP Developer to Go Developer: My Journey for Work
As a PHP developer, I’ve spent years working with frameworks like Laravel, CodeIgniter, and Drupal to build web applications, APIs, and manage databases. PHP has been my go-to language for most of my career – quick to learn, flexible, and supported by a rich ecosystem. But recently, everything changed. New projects at work required me to step outside my comfort zone and learn Go (Golang), and it wasn’t by choice. It was a necessity.
The systems I was asked to build required better performance, high concurrency, and scalability – features that PHP, despite its strengths, couldn’t easily handle. So, I found myself diving into Go, learning its syntax, concurrency model, and tools while trying to maintain productivity at work. The transition wasn’t easy, but it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made. In this post, I’ll share the core differences between PHP and Go that I had to understand to make the switch and how those differences impacted my workflow.
Why the Switch to Go? The Project Demands
Before diving into the technical differences, it’s important to understand the reason behind the switch. PHP had served me well, but the new projects I was handling demanded features that PHP just couldn’t provide efficiently.
