Here at the day job, we are slowly moving our (production) systems away from Windows and toward (Ubuntu LTS) Linux. The company has always been Windows-oriented, mostly due to the decisions of its President when it was founded, subsequent inertia, and the skillsets of the infrastructure teams. Now, though, we have an increased Linux knowledgebase in-house, we’ve started this reorientation toward PHP and other open-source products, and Linux just makes more sense.

I’ll try to keep this brief. Five years ago, I left my job as a production PHP programmer at a national consulting firm (business consulting, not development consulting) to take a job writing ColdFusion at a startup on the other side of the state.

Since then, I have learned the ins and outs of an arcane version of ColdFusion while using more modern languages, such as Ruby and Python, only in my spare time. Finally, after all these years, the business sees fit to undertake a rewrite and to leave ColdFusion behind. After much deliberation, PHP was chosen.