Why I adopted an ElePHPant(s)

Why I adopted an ElePHPant(s) – Article author: Saulius Vaičeliūnas – Software Engineer & Customer

As a Software Engineer I always try to follow industry standards

I adopted an elephpant a few days ago and vincent asked me to share my shopping experience. Here is my story. As a Software Engineer I always try to follow industry standards, clean code, SOLID, DRY, KISS principles. This applies to any language I work, but in this case – PHP. As working with PHP I always thought that there is always something more to the language. Someone maybe hate it, others may like it, but there is a special someone who lives in it – its the ElePHPant.

I first met him

I first met him when working with ZEND framework, as of time I am writing this now it is called LAMINAS. At the time Zend had a nice green ElePHPant that I found really adorable and a must have thing in my office. When i started looking for the adoption centers in the internet I came across the finding that there is even more species of ElePHPants in the world and instead of focusing the framework I found that the true Elly was a blue ElePHPant. It was like a love from the first sight. I kept searching where I can get it but I couldn’t find at that time so my only chance to adopt one was to go to conferences and try to take one, but without any luck I kept dreaming, wanting and eventually I even have forgot about it.

But that was long long time ago, more than ten years to be exact, until the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020 as yet again I found the love I lost for the ElePHPant. Being a Software Engineer is not easy task, as you need constantly change roles or expertise by the thingies you do, so the thingie I was doing required me to do a lot for other developers. It was hard tiering job and in that moment I remembered my forgotten friend. I started exploring the possibilities of adoption yet again and with my hard and tough character I managed to successfully find a adoption center…

Meet the Blue ElePHPant

He is the one who stays with me in the office and helps me to overcome all the stress and complex problems I may face. He also cheers me up on the sad moments, and celebrates happy moments. His position on the monitor allows him to do a quick code reviews and growl whenever there is a syntax errors, design inconsistencies or just something that is not logical at all.

adopt elephpant

I was lucky

I was lucky as adoption center instead of one sent me two of them and because they had some issues the Vincent Pontier, – Creator of ElePHPant and adoption center overseer, added a hand painted picture of Elly. So here it is meet the Pink ElePHPant. She stays at home with me and helps to overcome all the problems I might get at home.

In the picture she was caught visiting her husband at work, and thats fine, she also used that time to explain me some of the upcoming PHP version changes.

elephpant bue pink

As a married couple

As a married couple, they are living a normal life, the same life you may live with your wife or man. They work hard towards their goals, earn decent amount of knowledge everyday and most of all tries to help everyone around them. Having such great traits, I have no wonder that sometimes their friends come by just to have a quick chat or just spend some time together.

blue & pink elephpants

As I mentioned as a Software Engineer I always try to adopt industry standards and one of them is – Symfony framework usage to all projects or products I develop. But to strengthen the impact and understanding of it I needed some help. So finally after so much years of struggle in finding someone really valuable and trustworthy companion, I found him , – the Black Symfony ElePHPant.

symfony elephpant
trio elephpant

He is not only smart and friendly, but also he drives PHP to the new horizons

If you have doubts about it I would say don’t as of today the Symfony is the standard for building and powering Software solutions in PHP. You should trust it more as it will reward you in many ways that you would not expect to.

After so much years of waiting I finally have not one but three companions I can trust in everyday work life. If you still have doubts about getting one I would say don’t as they are really friendly and talkative. But there is a hidden thing here.

If you like to write spaghetti code

If you like to write spaghetti code, write code that is hard to maintain and test, write code without adopting the industry standards, design patterns and SOLID principles, then yes, they will growl and shout on you and you will find hard time living together with them. So if you are brave enough to improve as a Software Developer then adopt one of these cuties and start a journey on creating yet another unicorn software solution for the world together.

P.S. Have you ever heard of Rubber Duck Debugging? In my case I have yet another duck The Lego one, so in my case I use a Lego Duck Debugging 🙂

Duck

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elePHPant Drawing