My Journey: From PHP to Laravel: The Battle of the “Best” Language
After years of juggling between PHP, Python, and Java in my career, I find myself facing a reality that many developers know well: the gap between what I use at the office and what I choose for my personal projects. This experience has led me to think deeply about technology choices and what really matters when developing.
As a professional developer, I primarily work with Java in a professional context. It’s a solid language, well-established, with a mature ecosystem and recognized performance. However, when it comes to creating my own tools and personal projects, I systematically turn to Laravel and PHP. Here’s why the differences are so significant:
Comfort Before Pure Performance
There’s a tendency in our field to always want to choose the “best” language for each task. The most performant, the most modern, the most trendy. But this approach forgets a crucial factor: our own comfort and expertise. I’m convinced that it’s better to choose a language you’re comfortable with, even if it’s not theoretically optimal for the task, rather than struggling
After several years juggling between PHP, Python, and Java in my career, I find myself facing a reality that many developers know well: the gap between what I use at the office and what I choose for my personal projects. This experience has led me to think deeply about technology choices and what really matters when developing.
My Journey: From Professional Java to Personal Laravel
Currently, I work primarily with Java in a professional context. It’s a solid language, well-established, with a mature ecosystem and recognized performance. Yet, when it comes time to create my own tools and personal projects, I systematically turn to Laravel and PHP.
Why this difference? Simply because it’s with Laravel that I truly enjoy developing. The elegance of the syntax, the fluidity of the workflow, the richness of the ecosystem… everything contributes to giving me that flow sensation every developer seeks.
This experience made me realize something important: pure technique isn’t everything.
Comfort Before Pure Performance
There’s a tendency in our field to always want to choose the “best” language for each task. The most performant, the most modern, the most trendy. But this approach forgets a crucial factor: our own comfort and expertise.
I’m convinced that it’s better to choose a language you’re comfortable with, even if it’s not theoretically optimal for the task, rather than struggling with a technology you don’t master well. Of course, there are limits to this rule — nobody’s going to develop a critical embedded system in JavaScript — but in most cases, our ease with the tool matters more than its raw performance.
A fulfilled and productive developer with their preferred language will often deliver better results than a frustrated developer using the “best” technology.
Avoiding Unnecessary Complexity
This philosophy applies particularly when developing alone or in a small team. I’ve seen too many personal projects or startups get bogged down in over-complex architecture, chosen for its theoretical technical qualities rather than its practicality.
When you’re alone at the helm of a project, simplicity becomes a cardinal virtue. Better a well-structured Laravel monolith than a microservices architecture in Kubernetes if you don’t have the time or team to maintain it properly.
Technical complexity should respond to a real need, not to a desire to write beautiful code or follow the latest trends.
The Importance of Joy in Development
The joy of developing isn’t a luxury, it’s a success factor. When you love what you do, several things happen naturally:
- You’re more creative: solutions emerge more easily
- You’re more productive: code flows naturally
- You learn better: you spontaneously dig into aspects that intrigue you
- You persevere: when facing difficulties, motivation remains intact
That’s why I recommend choosing your language first by personal affinity, then adapting to specific technical constraints when they really present themselves.
Staying Curious Without Following Every Trend
This doesn’t mean you should lock yourself in your comfort zone. Curiosity remains essential in our profession. But there’s a difference between discovering new tools out of genuine interest and adopting every novelty out of fear of missing out.
Take GitHub Actions, which I plan to integrate into my next project. I’m not adopting it because it’s trendy, but because it addresses concrete needs: automating deployments, running tests on every commit, managing releases properly…
The key is to stay open to tools that bring concrete value to our workflow, not to those that just make noise on Twitter.
Some Practical Advice
🎯 For Choosing Your Main Language
- Test several languages on small projects
- Observe which one makes you naturally most productive
- Consider the ecosystem and community, not just the syntax
- Don’t underestimate the importance of documentation and learning resources
🔍 For Evaluating New Tools
- First identify a concrete problem in your workflow
- Test the tool on a non-critical project
- Evaluate the learning cost vs. the benefit provided
- Ask yourself if you’ll really use this tool in 6 months
🚀 For Avoiding Over-complexity
- Start simple, complexify only when necessary
- Favor solutions you know how to maintain
- Document your technical choices to remember why you made them
- Don’t be ashamed to use “simple” solutions if they work
Conclusion: Own Your Choices
In the end, there’s no perfect choice when it comes to programming languages. There are choices adapted to a context, a team, a project, and especially to a person.
I completely own my choice of Laravel for my personal projects, even if it’s not the most performant or trendy language. It allows me to create quickly and with pleasure, and that’s exactly what I need.
The most important thing is to choose consciously, weighing the real criteria that matter for your situation: your expertise, your constraints, your objectives, and yes, your joy of developing.
Because at the end of the day, a good developer with their favorite tools will always be worth more than a frustrated developer with the “best” tools.
What about you? How do you choose your languages and tools? Do you prioritize technical performance or your development comfort?
Drop a comment below and let’s discuss! 👇
