I've moved away from PHP and then regretted it

I started my career with PHP. I was pretty decent at building things.
Not the “copy-paste a snippet and pray” kind, but a real Core PHP, Laravel, full-stack developer building things end to end. And honestly? I enjoyed it.

Then the internet happened.

New frameworks started popping up like mushrooms after rain. Node.js, React, Vue, Angular, Next.js and the-next-big-thing.js. And along with them came articles. Oh, so many articles.

“PHP is dying.”, “PHP is a dead language.”, “Serious developers don’t use PHP.”,….

Naturally, like a responsible developer who clearly has free will, I believed all of it.

I looked at PHP. The language that paid my bills, shipped my projects, and quietly did it job and said: “You are dead to me”. And I left.

At some point, I just decided PHP was obsolete. I didn’t analyze it deeply. I didn’t question the narrative. I just assumed that moving forward meant moving away from PHP. So I did.

After that, I worked with different technologies like Django, Spring Boot, Node.js. Modern stacks. Enterprise vibes. Serious developer energy.

At first, it felt great.
Everything was shiny. Structured. Opinionated. Respectable.

With Node.js especially, things felt fast and powerful. Javascript everywhere. One language to rule them all. The dream.

Until the projects grew.
Suddenly. The server always needed to be running. The configuration files multiplied. Small changes required touching five different layers and work that took one unit of effort in PHP now took two in Node.

Nothing was wrong, but nothing felt right either. I wasn’t building anymore. I was managing complexity.

I am not saying those technologies are bad. They are not. They exist for a reason, and they do their jobs well.

Then at some point, I realized I wasn’t enjoying the process anymore. I was solving problems? Yes. But I wasn’t building the way I used to.

Then I touched PHP again.

Not out of loyalty. Not out of nostalgia. Just because it made sense for a project.

With PHP, I didn’t need permission. I didn’t need a running daemon. I didn’t need to negotiate with a framework to do simple things.

I wrote code. The code ran. I shipped features.

I had control.

From scratch, from nothing, request comes in, response goes out, logic in between. No ceremony. Simple. Clear. Predictable. No ego. Just clarity.

I could start from nothing and build exactly what I wanted. No friction. No feeling like the tool was deciding things for me.

The hatred I once had for PHP slowly evaporated. Not because PHP changed dramatically. But because I did.
I finally understood its value after walking away from it.

The truth is, many of us don’t leave technologies because they fail us. We leave them just because the internet tells us we should. Because trends move. Because being “modern” feels safer than being honest about what actually works for us.

For me, PHP works. Then,

I stopped chasing trends.
I stopped needing validation from from tech Twitter.
I started respecting tools for what they enable, not how fashionable they are.

I am not claiming it’s the best language. I am not saying other stacks are wrong. They are great. For the problems they were designed to solve.

But for the kind of web projects I build, the way I think and the way I like to work. PHP feels like home.

If I want to build something on the web tomorrow. PHP will be my first choice. Not because it’s popular. Not because it’s fashionable.

But because it gives me freedom.

And at this point, that matters more than trends.

Conclusion.

I am still working on PHP. For my personal projects. For me PHP continues to be my first choice for building web applications.

From now on, I will be sharing my project updates, my weird ideas, and the systems I design here.

I’ve always believed that knowledge grows when it’s shared. That’s why I don’t like the idea of locking it behind paywalls. This blog is just me learning, building things, sharing what I learn and learning from others too.

If you’d like to explore more of my work, you can find it at https://bhaswanth.com
If you want to reach out to me directly, feel free to email me at [e-mail]

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.