You’ve got a UK teaching qualification, you’re qualified to teach anywhere in the world, and then you move back to France only to discover—surprise!—your degree means absolutely nothing there. Estelle’s journey into PHP started with Brexit, a worthless PGCE, and the realization that living at your parents’ house for three years, hoping to win a competitive teaching slot, wasn’t exactly a solid life plan. So what do you do when you speak English and you’re a massive nerd? You become a developer, obviously.

MS-DOS and a Childhood That Should Have Been a Clue

Looking back, Estelle realizes the signs were all there. Growing up typing terminal commands on MS-DOS? Check. Being a massive nerd? Check. Yet somehow, development was never presented as an option. Fast forward through HTML, CSS, and JavaScript tutorials during the COVID lockdown, and she discovered her calling. With an amazing teacher named Xavier and French YouTube tutorials by Shamla, she learned PHP “for real” and never looked back. Well, except for that one year she tried React. We’ll get to that nightmare later.

Creating Community When Facebook Workplace Isn’t Cutting It

During her apprenticeship, Estelle was learning through Open Classrooms—a remote training course with nine increasingly difficult projects. The problem? The only way to talk to other learners was through Workplace, which Estelle describes with exactly zero kind words. You can’t share code properly, replies come 5,000 days later (okay, slight exaggeration), and it was generally rubbish. So she did what any sensible person would do: created an unofficial Discord server for PHP and Symfony learners in France. Turns out, instant communication and proper code formatting beat Facebook’s attempt at professional social networking.

That Time She Hated React for an Entire Year

Let’s just get this out of the way: Estelle tried React for a year. She hated every minute of it. “Really hope I’m never going back to it,” she says with the conviction of someone who’s been there and has absolutely no interest in returning. PHP it is, then.

Onboarding to Myddleware: Welcome to the Deep End

Myddleware is an open-source integration platform that lets you connect applications together—WordPress data into your CRM or vice versa, all fully customizable. It sounds straightforward until you realize the codebase is, in Estelle’s words, “kind of a mess.”

Community Contributions

Here’s the reality check nobody talks about enough: Estelle works for Akawaka, which is heavily invested in Silius. Her time is split between client projects and open-source contributions. Some months, it’s 90% client work, 10% Silius, and other months, it flips.

Mentoring Because Someone Did It For You

Remember that Discord community Estelle created? She’s still managing it. Why? Because when she was stuck on a project at 2 AM during the COVID lockdown, other people helped her. Now she pays it forward. Whether it’s reviewing pull requests, explaining Doctrine’s quirks, or just being available to answer questions, she believes in lifting others up. The PHP community is different, she says—people genuinely care and support each other in ways she hasn’t seen in other tech communities.

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