But if a free offering suddenly says "We are getting rid of free, only starting $899 a month baseline, because we noticed our free users aren't converting and we only want to support enterprise from now on". Well, then I have to move everything.

Still a big price hike can come, but +20% monthly is easier to stomach than if I can't be sure what will happen to the free offering.

I don't like free offerings, because what if they decide to charge someday? What if someone decides "free is not feasible, we start charging $20 per instance now".

I'd rather have a low fee now, a change from $2 to $3 is more likely and that's fine for me. But from free to not free is risky for me.

I also like smaller, independent-ish ompanies that actually care about developers. That's why I use bunny.net, transistor.fm, Plausible Analytics.

I think once you're deep into a project, you of course know the features needed and the constraints and you'll be more efficient the next time around.

I think the challenge is to keep working on your old legacy projects.

Plus Symfony is quite flexible on how you want to organize your code. Modular monolith, monolith, DDD, microservices, "junior developer just setting up controllers and entities".

You just said you don't believe this person, now you are criticizing them for apparently being braggy about it (which they weren't).

They want to offer services for free and you are saying "No, no one wants that here.". Who are you to talk for others? If you don't like the free offer, just move on.

There was nothing bad about the original post.

I wait 1-3 months, but then update. It used to take way longer, because Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk platform would take longer to update, but I've now changed to Platform.sh and the transition should be easier.

It has been very backward-compatible (i.e. stuff that works in 8.n also works in 8.n+1; and unless you use exotic functions or are relying on special functionality, it should work for you, too).

Once I'm at 8.4, I would slowly update the code / syntax with rector and the assistance of phpstan.

For framework updates I wait 1-2 patch versions before updating, because of composer dependency problems and sometimes bugs do still find themselves into new releases (e.g. I would wait at least until Symfony 7.2.1 before upgrading from Symfony 7.1.x).

Being a freelancer, I need to focus on what's marketable. Sure, Elixir will get me into a niche, but I will have way less projects to choose from. And when I start a project for a company, if I start with Elixir, I will also have a smaller pool of devs to recruit from. It's a chicken-and-egg problem.

Nowadays, if I start a project, I would try to build on monolith and full framework with a PaaS.

Unfortunately, most projects want to start out "the right way", which means separate backend (e.g. Java), separate frontend (React), rented server (e.g. Hetzner server) and custom deployment (some pipeline an outside agency built when they first started the project).

I'd rather spend 400 USD on tools each month, but then only need 1-2 full stack devs instead of 6-8 people (1 sys admin, 1-2 deployment, 2 backend, 2 frontend) and with all the overhead that comes with it.

I think I was still in German mode, it's called "electric punch" (Stromschlag) if translated literally, my brain went the easy route and tried to find the closest match.

Even if he's sitting on a different table, the moment I sit down his screen would blank for a few seconds then continue to work normally.

I also get electrocuted easily when I use the escalator. It almost doesn't matter what I wear, so it might have to do with my skin or it's conductivity? But that's just a wild theory that would need to be checked.

Edit: Some research seems to point to the static electricity from the chairs.

I took the WordPress-based / WooCommerce system and split it into 1) the Shopify system for admin stuff and also the whole payment system and 2) the "frontend" i.e. the consumer facing part BEFORE the payment (I used Symfony, similar to Laravel, but more modular and I was more familiar with it). Theoretically you could fetch all the product data via the Shopify API and then sync it automagically. But in the first iteration, we just copied some of the basic product data into a simple Symfony Admin backend and made a simple javascript-based checkout slide-out, and only when they were ready to pay, they would be forwarded to Shopify.

This way we would have full control of the user experience up to the point of purchase, and then Shopify would take over. I thought this was the best way I can deliver a performant website, while also being able to sleep well, because all the money stuff and all the customer data is handled by Shopify.

I was able to increase search engine traffic by 30% this way, reduce page size and increase page speeds and revenue increased significantly.

After 3 years, he decided he wanted to make it more "professional", so he fired me, I got none of the credit ("the search engine traffic must be because of better branding - and the page isn't up to my standards of aesthetics... yes, the designers who were supposed to deliver the designs kept stalling and delivered NOTHING and you had to just create something on the fly before the main selling season, and yes we had huge sales gains on the website and more traffic, but this was not because of the website"... they didn't change any of the marketing or any of their strategies, by the way.) So they hired an agency team with a project manager, designer, developer, marketing person; who then asked me to give them the source code from git so they can upload the code to their FTP server (!).

And they pretty much didn't change anything for a few years, everything looked the same. After like 4-5 years, they adjusted the design a bit, but still looked VERY similar.

I'm having some trouble finding analogies.

But maybe Symfony would be something like Linux Debian, has all the building blocks, it's modern but stable and well documented. Laravel is like Linux Ubuntu, it bases many things on Debian, but adds many things to make stuff a bit easier for the user. It's "shinier" and it has better marketing. You can add Debian stuff to Ubuntu, but you can't necessarily add Ubuntu stuff to Debian.

Symfony is more modular, you can add the components to any PHP project. Whereas Laravel uses many Symfony components and adds some syntactic sugar, but once you go into Laravel, it's difficult to stray away too far from the "Laravel way". Laravel uses many Symfony components, but Symfony can't easily use Laravel components.

Self-hosted Wordpress would maybe be comparable to a rooted Android phone. It has a very specific use case (for Wordpress it's fundamentally a Content Management System). You can add all sorts of plugins and additions. But it's also easy to accidentally break something. And once you added too many things, it might be difficult to update without breaking many things.

In the end, they're all Linux based, but living in very different ecosystems (just as Symfony, Laravel and Wordpress are PHP-based).

In programming terms, Symfony might be similar to Django (Python) or Spring Boot (Java), whereas Laravel is "cousins" with Ruby on Rails.

But the last 18 months have been hard. On some freelancing projects I was up against 80 or 120 other devs. (I live in Germany.)

Recruiting agencies have told me the same. I finally found 2 part-time projects after 6 months of search and will now try to wait our the dry period.

I use Symfony (Php) and have not used a full SPA after I retired AngularJS (v1) like 10 years ago. What people now call server side rendering (SSR) is just how Symfony works with its regular Twig templating language (heavily inspired by Django's templating language).

As I gained more experience, I rewrote it. Once from vanilla PHP to Laravel, then later to Symfony.

I personally prefer Symfony over Laravel because of it's modularity and extensibility, but Laravel has the edge on getting started quickly and available SaaS features (such as billing modules and stuff).

If you need SPA-ish features, you could use htmx and if you need some on-site interactivity, I like Alpine.js.

Pros: You can always change the provider in case you change your mind in the future. With gmail, you're locked in to their service (and if they lock you out for some reason, well, you're stuck).

I've only had side-projects, but one of them was big enough to pay the bills during the best of times. Currently it has hit a speed bump (more visitors, but less orders) so I'm just running it passively on the side, generating a little bit of profit, while I do freelancing.

In 2010 the the iPad was released and the movie Avatar had come out. So we're closer to 2038 than the release of the iPhone (2007).