Where to develop and how to grow professionally as a php programmer in a small company?

Question

PHP

Hello. I have been a programmer in a small company for 1.5 years already and as such, 1-3 people participate in projects, all at the same level, i.e. there is no clear separation between the senior and the mid. But I want to upgrade my skills so as not to feel some kind of gap in knowledge, so I'm a php programmer developing software on symfony and yii2, sometimes I write the rest of the application with a muzzle on agular (I don't use php template engines), the level of knowledge of symfony and yii2 is sufficient for that to write an application that the customer wants, I know php at the level of these very frameworks, I have never written applications without using these two frameworks, the level of knowledge of angular is enough to write a face for the customer, but if something new is needed, then the documentation will help me. But I feel some kind of threshold of ignorance and a feeling of limbo that here I will have such a splinter that my knowledge will not be enough, and because. Our company is small, so I am not under anyone's wing. Tell me how to develop in order to become more professional in my field than I am now on the conditions that I described?

Answer 1

Take a look at the market - a bunch of cool loaded services are being made in the world.
To answer yourself, answer me (I'm growing, I'm interested):
- do you write tests? TDD? DDD?
- Do you make a service layer?
- Do you follow GRASP and SOLID?
- is there anything open source? (for example, did you do something for the same Symfony?)
- have you optimized huge loads?
- did they run into the limits of php and did they take out individual elements of the system into other languages?
- did you teach the guys (from scratch, good code and practices)?
- Did you work on international projects?
- did you drink anything of your own that became popular?
- Did you participate in conferences?
If everywhere yes - tell me, what kind of small company is it, in which you can grow like that?
In short - make a list of what you are weak in, what you would like - and hit these points with the force of reinforced concrete!

Answer 2

Who prevents to do the next new project under the studied framework.
Until you start doing it in practice, you will not improve your skills.

Answer 3

Commits to any open-source project you like.

Answer 4

But I want to pump my skills

If you want, download. Keep a list of those knowledge that you want to pull up - and do it gradually.
Perhaps you should change company, work in another team. I do not recommend sitting too long in one place at the start of a career - you need to gain experience in different teams, watch how the process is established in certain companies.

Answer 5

memcached(memcached cluster) for caching and as a database, elasticsearch or sphinx for full-text search and as a database, clickhouse for analytics, partitioning-sharding replication for working with a database.
But if it didn’t come in handy for you, then you can score on everything except memcached.

Answer 6

in a small company there are a lot of advantages
, you yourself can develop where everyone will develop what technologies to introduce and what will come of you