I’m a professional software developer but choose to use PHP and JavaScript for my “personal” projects. When other software development professionals hear this I often get asked why, because PHP has “no future”. 

It is all about ease of use! Getting a local development server up and running on my new laptop takes about 5 minutes. I just download XAMPP and run an install, for tooling I download VS Code (also free) and I can be developing new code 10 minutes after I open my brand new laptop. Best of all it is completely free! 

But, I hear my colleagues say, you could use the cloud for Nodejs, C#, Java etc! Yes I could but those are 1. Not as easy to setup and 2. Not quite as free. If I develop something that has financial possibilities I can upload it onto a basic web hosting site for R40 per month. If and when it becomes a success I can then move it to a real hosting environment. 

But, I hear them say again, you can set up a free web application on Azure or a t2.micro on AWS. Again, I agree I could, but then I need to worry about the OS, or the hosting platform, and then I need to check my security so that I can access my MySQL database from my local development machine. With my friendly local hosting provider I get a pre setup FTP account, a click of a button for a MySQL database that I can access from my local machine. 

But, yet again <rolls eyes>, that will never be as secure. I agree it isn’t, but so far it’s a simple little idea I was testing out, it is not a super secret app that has my banking details on it. 

IF and WHEN I get an idea that works, then taking the time and effort to configure a secure, elastic, load balanced and expensive environment will become worth while.