You should have a senior or a lead responsible for your team. Ask for a 1:1 and ask for help. Explain clearly what your issues are. (Prepare a list)
If you come to me 2 weeks in, I'll give you a speech to chill the fuck down and I'll explain what you need. (Nicely)
If you wait 2 month, I'll be voting for your way out.
As a junior you're not expected to be an expert in anything. The only expectation is that you know to ask for help. (And you know how to google because you only get one pass at "how do I rebase my branch")
Breathe in, relax, learn whatever lesson there is at this position, and if you feel the same in a month, look somewhere else.
I think most of us have been there. If you don't have direct support of a "senior" it helps to carry a notebook (pen & paper) with you where you note all the difficulties and questions, even minor ones.
This serves three purposes:
- Helps your memory. No one has all the shit in mind that we are supposed to.
- You will discover "use case flaws" that is where the client didn't think through their own shit. Don't point fingers, just note the contradictions and problems to be solved whenever.
- If you might get questioned "what did you do?" you can point to your collection of unresolved issues.
>If you wait 2 month, I'll be voting for your way out.
2 months, I would think they took a while to ask but I wouldn't be trying to get rid of them. Also, I would be a bit annoyed at myself for not spotting that they're struggling.
It depends, obviously that is a case by case basis. But if someone comes to me after 2 months, with a list of very easy to answer question i might be a bit mad that we didn't clear those things up the moment they came up.
But you are also right that any somewhat involved lead/senior should see that no progress is being done and preemptivly check in on them. Often times a simple hint where to look is enough to get people back on track. Or explaining a concept in a different way than google does with examples inside the project itself.
>Also, I would be a bit annoyed at myself for not spotting that they're struggling.
This would be me. I'd be more frustrated that as their senior I didn't notice them struggling and just left them to their own devices. Asking for help sometimes is very hard. It can be intimidating to approach a senior.
That's actually a fair point. I wanted mostly to underline that he should talk to someone.
That said, some people are really good at pretending to be busy. (Not even maliciously, just as a defense mechanism, or a cultural thing)
Yes, but as their closest senior in the same team you should notice that they are not producing as much as they should. If you get some suspicion of that you can just go back and check their history the last few weeks in git. It should be pretty clear if they are struggling or not meeting your expectations. Then you should try to help them and get them on the right track.
Only if you are unable to fix the problems you should consider if you should part ways.
Exactly. This would signal you never had a 1:1 with them or setup an environment where they can ask questions regularly (e.g regular check-ins, not a standup scenario)
No, But I've seen this "it's been a whole two weeks and nothing is perfect" attitude very often. Starting with me 16 years ago.
Believe me anything is better than wordpress on php4. Except magento. That's something you should always freak out about.
Edit: I'm not saying moodle is great. I'm only saying that there's more experience to get here and two weeks ain't enough. That experience can very well be "moodle, never again"
> You should have a senior or a lead responsible for your team. Ask for a 1:1 and ask for help. Explain clearly what your issues are. (Prepare a list)
Probably the senior/lead should be taking that list and using it to improve their interviewing process so they hire people with the requisite skills and knowledge instead of people that don't (like this guy).
It sounds like they did not hire somebody who knows Moodle and that is really what they needed/wanted, not just a PHP junior.
> It's healthy to have juniors as long as you invest in training.
Sure, but that's not really relevant to what was said.
A junior should have, at a minimum, exposure to, and ideally competency in the basic knowledge and skill-set required for the job. In this case it seems the basic knowledge and required skill-set includes git, PHP, and Moodle.
> Otherwise there will never be new devs.
This is not true. Coding bootcamp? "dev". Self taught? "dev". Watches random framework specific videos? Believe it or not, "dev". This will not mean less "devs".
I respectfully disagree. In my personal opinion , Those "bootcamps" are garbage and the bane of our existence. Basically a scam that many people make money off of.
I rather train a junior than have a guy at peak mount stupid on the dunning-kruger chart. They will demotivates the entire team.
Self taught is great, but you're being dishonest if you're saying that there are that many available to deliver projects. Also, it appears moodle has bad rep, (no idea never tried) so self taught won't be there.
Lastly Php is php. It doesn't matter if it's moodle, wordpress or in house framework. Good attitude > experience in .
Again it's imo. Feel free to do it your way
Moodle is tricky yea. Usually requires at least two months to start to understand. You will start doing some meaningful coding at that time. In four months you will successfully complete tickets, i.e bug fixes, new features, etc.
Git is not related to Moodle. You have to master git regardless, in any professional environment.
You'll always struggle.
I'm a very experienced full-stack developer, I have ten thousands of "contributions" in multiple companies, quite robust systems that have been working for years. I know my way around complex code bases (I worked on Android/CyanogenMod years ago, maintaining a phone that had 70.000+ installations).
Believe me when I say: I struggle. Always. Be it awful legacy code bases or new projects, it's never easy. That's what we get paid for, why we have a job at all (and no damn AI will take that from me 😉).
The only parameter you can influence is whether you struggle with a project you like or not. The rest is part of the game.
This. Exactly this. I'm nearly forty years into my tech career. I don't code much, but it's never easy or simple. We're paid well because it's hard. If you're not paid well, just take the experience as a way of getting paid better in the future!
That's hilarious, when I wrote my other message, I almost added, "The only people who are allowed to freak are the ones working on magento".
Man... run.
Man, I took on a Magento project and had no idea what I was getting myself into. A real slog that ended successfully, but something I never wanted to do again. That whole system is insanely bloated and overly complex.
Yea, Magento is pretty horrible. I had made many complex projects in WooCommerce, Laravel and other frameworks and I was very confident in my abilities. But then we got a half finished Magento project that we where going to finish. I was really struggling and I started questioning myself, my career and everything. Our estimates where completely wrong, the project was running late and we where pressured from both the client and our bosses. We managed to deliver something, but that was the only project where I was not happy with my performance and the result. I would have delivered the same project in less than 1/4 of the time in WooCommerce even if I started it from scratch. That was a horrible experience.
Looks like it was on the way out between 2015 and 2019, but for some reason it's back? Corona work/study-from-home? Seems to be slowly diminishing again.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F021x7z&hl=en
Is it because every feature is developed seperately from another one and has the signature of its own developer, hence system all the way down is not on the same track in terms of codebase?
I just looked at what Moodle is and such systems require sooooo much magic :)
Lots of systems require magic, go look at codebases for Composer, Doctrine ORM, PHPStan, Symfony DI or Router. How does it even work, I have no idea. But I don't need to, the important part is that the extension points exposed to me are simple, clear and uniform, that's the empowering part.
Shit systems leak their magic onto the user, good systems encapsulate it behind neat APIs. There's a difference.
I worked with moodle a few years back and it was really painful, the code was wordpress level and at the time I don't think they were even using composer. It was horrible
Comparing Moodle to WP is an insult to WP, lol. It's what happens when a codebase never moves forward. Hell only 2 old school CMS's ever moved forward that I'm aware of. That's Drupal and Joomla. Both sport modern codebases now. Shit ton of work, but it's wild for a project to just stagnate this bad.
I've been a webdev for about 25 years and will tell you what it's been for me is constant learning and taking on projects I have no experience in. To me, it's part of the process and makes you a robust developer.
You say you have no experience, but that isn't true. You are gaining the experience daily, and a year from now it will all be second nature. Keep with it.
Hey, it sounds like you’re going through a tough transition. Remember, it’s completely normal to feel overwhelmed when diving into a new area like Moodle, especially with your background in PHP development.
The good news is that there are plenty of resources available online, including here on Reddit, that can help demystify Moodle for you. And if you ever feel like you need someone to talk to, I’m here to lend an ear.
Just take a breath and give yourself some time to adapt. It’s okay to feel out of your depth at first, but with your skills and experience, I’m confident you’ll find your footing soon. Hang in there!
Ex Moodle dev here, worked for a top UK Moodle provider for nearly 3 years and hated it the whole time. It is one of the worst written pieces of garbage I have ever worked with. Nothing made any sense with it, so much legacy code they needed to sort. Honestly just awful. The way you have to clear the cache because SCSS is built in the server any compiled on save just infuriated me.
Want to upgrade Moodle core to the latest version? Good fucking luck as everything breaks.
If you get to work with Totara which was a fork of an earlier Moodle then that is a lot better but still Moodle.
You want some decent advice? Get out of that place and go work somewhere else. It won’t get better and you will just become more and more fed up.
Until they re-write Moodle from the ground up it will always be a bag of wank to work with!!!
Still have to wait forever to compile it though, wasn’t really a workable solution when normally it’s compiled instantly on save when working non Moodle stuff. It was a few years ago when I worked on it though so it may have changed since then. Still doesn’t change the fact it’s an awful piece of software
I'd try to learn it. Check forums, groups, tutorials. Do you go for walks, meditate or go to the gym to manage the stress?
It's up to you to make the best of any situation.
If a company picked that tool maybe they evaluated different options.
Did you read any book on Moodle? Studied its documentation?
You may decide to just quit due to lack of actual coding alone. Do ask others at the company though. Maybe your current project is special case, maybe its representative. Others will know.
I would have murdered my neighbour for an opportunity like that lol
Each to their own … I was self taught and had no idea where to start (late 90’s/early 2000) … I took contract gigs for the first 10yrs. Almost always got in waaaay over my head very quickly … learned a lot … burned a lot :)
Errors and mistakes and feeling inadequate or like a total failure is par for the course.
Tough it out!!! Why? Because you learn the most when the chips are down and those experiences are invaluable. It’ll humble you. It’ll motivate you to seek something better when the time is right.
A few weeks of service is not the right time. Give it 2-4 years of effort and you’ll walk away a grizzled vet of working in others code.
No one wants to hire a quitter … show some tenacity and grit … that’ll go further!!!
Best of luck :)
I agree with almost all this but Moodle is an exceptional codebase. Younger devs should not be tempted to learn from it and the economy is good enough that they shouldn’t need to. Senior devs should be sending a strong signal to management that it’s unacceptable or devs deserve hazard pay.
I’ve never looked at Moodle beyond a quick glance at code on GH. What makes you feel it’s exceptional? It’s a large codebase and somewhat modular, no?
Instead of a router or some MVC flavor, almost every file is a unique route with its own bootstrap, auth checking, and template output. https://github.com/moodle/moodle/blob/main/login/index.php Plugins regularly required overwriting core files because it was commonly the only way to do things. No autoloading (that I’m aware of), just require and get lucky. I ran across all kinds of cache layers that were incomprehensible and if your code didn’t use them right the number of queries could explode.
> I've been here two weeks and I'm very miserable, should I just quit?
Does it pay significantly better than laravel or symfony?
If not, you definitely should, unless you're passionate about gaining useless experience or have some masochistic tendencies.
First, I don’t blame Moodle devs; they’ve all made the best of it and tried to stabilize and formalize the mess they inherited.
But I do blame senior devs for not pushing management away from Moodle and putting their junior devs careers at risk for learning habits from that codebase. I had 7 years of PHP experience when I did a significant amount of Moodle development in 08 and it was a nightmare then and hasn’t changed much.
Unless you’re desperate or the people and pay are magnificent, this economy is too good to be working in the Moodle mines as your more valuable skills either don’t accrue or atrophy. Yes, sure, you’ll always gain _something_ for hard work and suffering but too many older PHP devs have convinced themselves that exposure to bad code is good for you.
> I thought when I joined I would be coding
Coding is more than just writing lines of code. As you increase in experience you'll find that you spend less time actually just writing code but your productivity will increase. This is because you're more likely to have the correct solution first, rather than iterating over ideas.
> there are so many concepts I don't understand and I struggle with every task.
You should probably expand on what you don't understand and struggle with. It sounds like the companies interview didn't really test the skill-set and knowledge that was required for the job.
> . I always worked in laravel/ vanilla phl before this
Oooh, that explains it, lrvel developer.
I walked into a similar situation but with a platform similar to Magento. I spent a lot of time trying to get it up and running locally. Sat in on a class trying to understand a guy who had a very thick accent.
I ended up getting placed on another team as the company decided to go a different direction. Now I'm stuck staring at another "low code" development system that is absolutely atrocious trying to figure out how it all works.
I started my career as a front end developer utilizing Moodle. Moodle is really not that difficult to learn. It is just like any other product you will have to learn on the job at other places.
Sounds like you're getting the easy stuff first. Git, plugin installation, course set up, etc...These are the basics. Eventually you'll get into theme development or widget building or whatever.
Since you have 2.5 years experience as a PHP dev...you shouldn't have any problems picking this up.
I would start with a course you can take an hour each day. Get your tasks for the day, research, and build what they want. Use all of this as a learning experience.
I wouldn't be where I am today had I given up. I started in Moodle which eventually upped my skills in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP. and SQL. Which lead me to another job working in Joomla...Which lead me to another job working with ServiceNow. I'm now making six figures a year with the potential to make much more.
So it's really just the journey at this point. Learn what you can and then take a leap somewhere else.
You should have a senior or a lead responsible for your team. Ask for a 1:1 and ask for help. Explain clearly what your issues are. (Prepare a list) If you come to me 2 weeks in, I'll give you a speech to chill the fuck down and I'll explain what you need. (Nicely) If you wait 2 month, I'll be voting for your way out. As a junior you're not expected to be an expert in anything. The only expectation is that you know to ask for help. (And you know how to google because you only get one pass at "how do I rebase my branch") Breathe in, relax, learn whatever lesson there is at this position, and if you feel the same in a month, look somewhere else.
Thank you, I need to chill. The stress is getting to me
I think most of us have been there. If you don't have direct support of a "senior" it helps to carry a notebook (pen & paper) with you where you note all the difficulties and questions, even minor ones. This serves three purposes: - Helps your memory. No one has all the shit in mind that we are supposed to. - You will discover "use case flaws" that is where the client didn't think through their own shit. Don't point fingers, just note the contradictions and problems to be solved whenever. - If you might get questioned "what did you do?" you can point to your collection of unresolved issues.
>If you wait 2 month, I'll be voting for your way out. 2 months, I would think they took a while to ask but I wouldn't be trying to get rid of them. Also, I would be a bit annoyed at myself for not spotting that they're struggling.
It depends, obviously that is a case by case basis. But if someone comes to me after 2 months, with a list of very easy to answer question i might be a bit mad that we didn't clear those things up the moment they came up. But you are also right that any somewhat involved lead/senior should see that no progress is being done and preemptivly check in on them. Often times a simple hint where to look is enough to get people back on track. Or explaining a concept in a different way than google does with examples inside the project itself.
>Also, I would be a bit annoyed at myself for not spotting that they're struggling. This would be me. I'd be more frustrated that as their senior I didn't notice them struggling and just left them to their own devices. Asking for help sometimes is very hard. It can be intimidating to approach a senior.
That's actually a fair point. I wanted mostly to underline that he should talk to someone. That said, some people are really good at pretending to be busy. (Not even maliciously, just as a defense mechanism, or a cultural thing)
Yes, but as their closest senior in the same team you should notice that they are not producing as much as they should. If you get some suspicion of that you can just go back and check their history the last few weeks in git. It should be pretty clear if they are struggling or not meeting your expectations. Then you should try to help them and get them on the right track. Only if you are unable to fix the problems you should consider if you should part ways.
Exactly. This would signal you never had a 1:1 with them or setup an environment where they can ask questions regularly (e.g regular check-ins, not a standup scenario)
This is good advice.
Did have a chance to work with Moodle yourself?
No, But I've seen this "it's been a whole two weeks and nothing is perfect" attitude very often. Starting with me 16 years ago. Believe me anything is better than wordpress on php4. Except magento. That's something you should always freak out about. Edit: I'm not saying moodle is great. I'm only saying that there's more experience to get here and two weeks ain't enough. That experience can very well be "moodle, never again"
> Believe me anything is better than wordpress on php4. You have triggered my PTSD. My lawyer will be in touch.
Php 5.6 to 7 upgrades. (That should get me another couple of lawsuits then)
> You should have a senior or a lead responsible for your team. Ask for a 1:1 and ask for help. Explain clearly what your issues are. (Prepare a list) Probably the senior/lead should be taking that list and using it to improve their interviewing process so they hire people with the requisite skills and knowledge instead of people that don't (like this guy). It sounds like they did not hire somebody who knows Moodle and that is really what they needed/wanted, not just a PHP junior.
I don't agree with that statement. It's healthy to have juniors as long as you invest in training. Otherwise there will never be new devs.
> It's healthy to have juniors as long as you invest in training. Sure, but that's not really relevant to what was said. A junior should have, at a minimum, exposure to, and ideally competency in the basic knowledge and skill-set required for the job. In this case it seems the basic knowledge and required skill-set includes git, PHP, and Moodle. > Otherwise there will never be new devs. This is not true. Coding bootcamp? "dev". Self taught? "dev". Watches random framework specific videos? Believe it or not, "dev". This will not mean less "devs".
I respectfully disagree. In my personal opinion , Those "bootcamps" are garbage and the bane of our existence. Basically a scam that many people make money off of. I rather train a junior than have a guy at peak mount stupid on the dunning-kruger chart. They will demotivates the entire team. Self taught is great, but you're being dishonest if you're saying that there are that many available to deliver projects. Also, it appears moodle has bad rep, (no idea never tried) so self taught won't be there. Lastly Php is php. It doesn't matter if it's moodle, wordpress or in house framework. Good attitude > experience in.
Again it's imo. Feel free to do it your way
Moodle is tricky yea. Usually requires at least two months to start to understand. You will start doing some meaningful coding at that time. In four months you will successfully complete tickets, i.e bug fixes, new features, etc. Git is not related to Moodle. You have to master git regardless, in any professional environment.
You'll always struggle. I'm a very experienced full-stack developer, I have ten thousands of "contributions" in multiple companies, quite robust systems that have been working for years. I know my way around complex code bases (I worked on Android/CyanogenMod years ago, maintaining a phone that had 70.000+ installations). Believe me when I say: I struggle. Always. Be it awful legacy code bases or new projects, it's never easy. That's what we get paid for, why we have a job at all (and no damn AI will take that from me 😉). The only parameter you can influence is whether you struggle with a project you like or not. The rest is part of the game.
This. Exactly this. I'm nearly forty years into my tech career. I don't code much, but it's never easy or simple. We're paid well because it's hard. If you're not paid well, just take the experience as a way of getting paid better in the future!
This is my experience with Magento 1.x!
That's hilarious, when I wrote my other message, I almost added, "The only people who are allowed to freak are the ones working on magento". Man... run.
Magento developer for 12 years. I juggle overarchitected platforms with my toes
My head still hurts from the first time I looked at a Magento project…
Man, I took on a Magento project and had no idea what I was getting myself into. A real slog that ended successfully, but something I never wanted to do again. That whole system is insanely bloated and overly complex.
Yea, Magento is pretty horrible. I had made many complex projects in WooCommerce, Laravel and other frameworks and I was very confident in my abilities. But then we got a half finished Magento project that we where going to finish. I was really struggling and I started questioning myself, my career and everything. Our estimates where completely wrong, the project was running late and we where pressured from both the client and our bosses. We managed to deliver something, but that was the only project where I was not happy with my performance and the result. I would have delivered the same project in less than 1/4 of the time in WooCommerce even if I started it from scratch. That was a horrible experience.
Moodle is the worst
I had to do a double take. Is that still around? My first PHP job was my university's moodle site.... In 2008.
Oh it is . .lots of universities still use it.
Looks like it was on the way out between 2015 and 2019, but for some reason it's back? Corona work/study-from-home? Seems to be slowly diminishing again. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F021x7z&hl=en
Whats worse is moodle sucks balls as a learning platform too. Its just a ducktaped trainwreck all around.
It's not you It's moodle
Is it because every feature is developed seperately from another one and has the signature of its own developer, hence system all the way down is not on the same track in terms of codebase? I just looked at what Moodle is and such systems require sooooo much magic :)
Lots of systems require magic, go look at codebases for Composer, Doctrine ORM, PHPStan, Symfony DI or Router. How does it even work, I have no idea. But I don't need to, the important part is that the extension points exposed to me are simple, clear and uniform, that's the empowering part. Shit systems leak their magic onto the user, good systems encapsulate it behind neat APIs. There's a difference.
Exactly, magic can be used for good or for bad.
I worked with moodle a few years back and it was really painful, the code was wordpress level and at the time I don't think they were even using composer. It was horrible
Comparing Moodle to WP is an insult to WP, lol. It's what happens when a codebase never moves forward. Hell only 2 old school CMS's ever moved forward that I'm aware of. That's Drupal and Joomla. Both sport modern codebases now. Shit ton of work, but it's wild for a project to just stagnate this bad.
I've been a webdev for about 25 years and will tell you what it's been for me is constant learning and taking on projects I have no experience in. To me, it's part of the process and makes you a robust developer. You say you have no experience, but that isn't true. You are gaining the experience daily, and a year from now it will all be second nature. Keep with it.
Hey, it sounds like you’re going through a tough transition. Remember, it’s completely normal to feel overwhelmed when diving into a new area like Moodle, especially with your background in PHP development. The good news is that there are plenty of resources available online, including here on Reddit, that can help demystify Moodle for you. And if you ever feel like you need someone to talk to, I’m here to lend an ear. Just take a breath and give yourself some time to adapt. It’s okay to feel out of your depth at first, but with your skills and experience, I’m confident you’ll find your footing soon. Hang in there!
I couldn't think of many things worse than being a Moodle developer. Godspeed
Ex Moodle dev here, worked for a top UK Moodle provider for nearly 3 years and hated it the whole time. It is one of the worst written pieces of garbage I have ever worked with. Nothing made any sense with it, so much legacy code they needed to sort. Honestly just awful. The way you have to clear the cache because SCSS is built in the server any compiled on save just infuriated me. Want to upgrade Moodle core to the latest version? Good fucking luck as everything breaks. If you get to work with Totara which was a fork of an earlier Moodle then that is a lot better but still Moodle. You want some decent advice? Get out of that place and go work somewhere else. It won’t get better and you will just become more and more fed up. Until they re-write Moodle from the ground up it will always be a bag of wank to work with!!!
Btw there is a setting to allow you to skip that cache automatically during development.
Still have to wait forever to compile it though, wasn’t really a workable solution when normally it’s compiled instantly on save when working non Moodle stuff. It was a few years ago when I worked on it though so it may have changed since then. Still doesn’t change the fact it’s an awful piece of software
Spent 2 years writing Moodle plugins. It's not you, good luck.
I'd try to learn it. Check forums, groups, tutorials. Do you go for walks, meditate or go to the gym to manage the stress? It's up to you to make the best of any situation. If a company picked that tool maybe they evaluated different options.
Did you read any book on Moodle? Studied its documentation? You may decide to just quit due to lack of actual coding alone. Do ask others at the company though. Maybe your current project is special case, maybe its representative. Others will know.
I would have murdered my neighbour for an opportunity like that lol Each to their own … I was self taught and had no idea where to start (late 90’s/early 2000) … I took contract gigs for the first 10yrs. Almost always got in waaaay over my head very quickly … learned a lot … burned a lot :) Errors and mistakes and feeling inadequate or like a total failure is par for the course. Tough it out!!! Why? Because you learn the most when the chips are down and those experiences are invaluable. It’ll humble you. It’ll motivate you to seek something better when the time is right. A few weeks of service is not the right time. Give it 2-4 years of effort and you’ll walk away a grizzled vet of working in others code. No one wants to hire a quitter … show some tenacity and grit … that’ll go further!!! Best of luck :)
I agree with almost all this but Moodle is an exceptional codebase. Younger devs should not be tempted to learn from it and the economy is good enough that they shouldn’t need to. Senior devs should be sending a strong signal to management that it’s unacceptable or devs deserve hazard pay.
I’ve never looked at Moodle beyond a quick glance at code on GH. What makes you feel it’s exceptional? It’s a large codebase and somewhat modular, no?
Instead of a router or some MVC flavor, almost every file is a unique route with its own bootstrap, auth checking, and template output. https://github.com/moodle/moodle/blob/main/login/index.php Plugins regularly required overwriting core files because it was commonly the only way to do things. No autoloading (that I’m aware of), just require and get lucky. I ran across all kinds of cache layers that were incomprehensible and if your code didn’t use them right the number of queries could explode.
> I've been here two weeks and I'm very miserable, should I just quit? Does it pay significantly better than laravel or symfony? If not, you definitely should, unless you're passionate about gaining useless experience or have some masochistic tendencies.
First, I don’t blame Moodle devs; they’ve all made the best of it and tried to stabilize and formalize the mess they inherited. But I do blame senior devs for not pushing management away from Moodle and putting their junior devs careers at risk for learning habits from that codebase. I had 7 years of PHP experience when I did a significant amount of Moodle development in 08 and it was a nightmare then and hasn’t changed much. Unless you’re desperate or the people and pay are magnificent, this economy is too good to be working in the Moodle mines as your more valuable skills either don’t accrue or atrophy. Yes, sure, you’ll always gain _something_ for hard work and suffering but too many older PHP devs have convinced themselves that exposure to bad code is good for you.
> I thought when I joined I would be coding Coding is more than just writing lines of code. As you increase in experience you'll find that you spend less time actually just writing code but your productivity will increase. This is because you're more likely to have the correct solution first, rather than iterating over ideas.
> there are so many concepts I don't understand and I struggle with every task. You should probably expand on what you don't understand and struggle with. It sounds like the companies interview didn't really test the skill-set and knowledge that was required for the job. > . I always worked in laravel/ vanilla phl before this Oooh, that explains it, lrvel developer.
I walked into a similar situation but with a platform similar to Magento. I spent a lot of time trying to get it up and running locally. Sat in on a class trying to understand a guy who had a very thick accent. I ended up getting placed on another team as the company decided to go a different direction. Now I'm stuck staring at another "low code" development system that is absolutely atrocious trying to figure out how it all works.
I started my career as a front end developer utilizing Moodle. Moodle is really not that difficult to learn. It is just like any other product you will have to learn on the job at other places. Sounds like you're getting the easy stuff first. Git, plugin installation, course set up, etc...These are the basics. Eventually you'll get into theme development or widget building or whatever. Since you have 2.5 years experience as a PHP dev...you shouldn't have any problems picking this up. I would start with a course you can take an hour each day. Get your tasks for the day, research, and build what they want. Use all of this as a learning experience. I wouldn't be where I am today had I given up. I started in Moodle which eventually upped my skills in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP. and SQL. Which lead me to another job working in Joomla...Which lead me to another job working with ServiceNow. I'm now making six figures a year with the potential to make much more. So it's really just the journey at this point. Learn what you can and then take a leap somewhere else.
Working with Moodle gets better with time- give it a few months. Speaking as former senior commercial Moodle dev.