The Artisan Files: Chris Gmyr

This week I’m happy to have Chris Gmyr share a little about himself in this weeks Artisan Files interview.

#Can you tell us about yourself?

I’m 29 years old and currently live in Syracuse, NY with my wife and two dogs. I’ve been playing drums for over 16 years and love listening to music (most kinds at least). I also brew my own beer and ride a motorcycle.

I got into web development back around 2000 when I started taking some classes in high school about the web. I quickly made a site for the band that I was in at the time, then happened to pick up some clients from some contacts that the teacher knew. I soon grew a little portfolio and set myself up on Creative Moonlighter which is now guru.com. I was able to build up my portfolio even faster and got more clients. Eventually I got to the point where the clients were looking for more than static pages and I started working with PHP.

From about 2003 through 2014 I built and managed my own company, more recently called Modo Media Group, where I did all of the development and project management. However, over the past 2 years I’ve been focused more on larger/private development contracts in addition to starting to make some of my own SaaS products (still in progress).

Over the years I have built many types of sites from simple/static ones to full-blown e-commerce, CMS’s, multi-domain systems, social media platforms, and even a few SaaS apps. Most of these were built on the CodeIgniter framework, but more recent projects use Laravel (of course).

#Where did the inspiration come from for your messenger package?

The messenger package came from needing a simple to use message system myself. I’ve written a few other systems in the past that became too clunky and hard to manage. I’m working on a side project right now that will implement user messaging, so I figured I would make a package to do specificly that. I looked around at some other packages that didn’t really do what I wanted them to, so I figured I’d make my own. I’m hoping to work on some more packages very soon.

#You use Angular, what would you say the advantage to using it with Laravel is?

The biggest advantage with the Angular/Laravel setup is how easy it is to make an API with Laravel and access it with Angular. You can pretty much have a working API within minutes in Laravel. Speed of development is crucial, and Laravel has sped up my developement time significantly in addition to making me a better developer.

#What is your favorite Laravel feature?

There are so many great features in Laravel, but I think my most recent favorite is Queues. In my last few projects I’ve implemented push queues with IronIO and it’s really been amazing. It’s great to be able to just throw something onto the queue and let it do its thing.

#What are your must have mac and iOS apps?

Mac:

• PHPStorm
• Sublime Text
• Navicat Premium
• SourceTree
• iTerm2
• Shuttle (SSH Bookmarks)
• Alfred
• Mou
• Vagrant

Mac/iOS:

• Evernote
• Dropbox
• Roboform
• Trello
• Tweetbot
• Feedly
• Buffer
• Pocket

iOS:

• Grasshopper
• LogMeIn
• New Relic

#Finally how do you think development will change in 10 years?

Wow, who knows, right!?! Life as a developer today is nothing like it was 10 years ago, so it’s hard to say what will happen in the next 10 years. With that said, I believe that PHP will continue to grow and become even stronger. Tools like Composer have already done wonders for the PHP community, so I’d expect more tools will emerge that make our lives even easier. JavaScript frameworks like Angular will continue to grow and become even more popular and easier to use. I’d also hope that the networking infrustucture in the US and around the world will continue to get better so that developers can continue to make better web and mobile applications. Even though it’s hard to keep up with all of the new shiny dev stuff sometimes, I’m really looking forward to what the next 10 years has in store for us.