PHP Alive And Kicking: Episode 7 – Steve McDougall

The Bored Sysadmin Who Chose PHP Over .NET

a young Linux sysadmin whose job involves kicking the mail server once a week and spending the rest of the time playing Call of Duty. Steve watched the dev team actually creating things and decided to join them. JavaScript looked “kind of cool,” PHP “made sense,” and .NET? “I’ll see you later.” The choice was made.

The Pre-Cloud Cloud Storage Solution

Before iTunes existed in the cloud—before the cloud existed—Steve forgot his MP3 player USB stick at home one day. Rather than face the horror of talking to people at the office, he did the socially awkward thing: taught himself PHP and built an online MP3 player. Later, refusing to pay for Dropbox before a holiday, he built his own file storage app. Sometimes the best motivation is just being cheap and antisocial.

How “Fucking Steve” Was Born

Steve listened to PHP Ugly for the first time and tweeted that he didn’t like how much they bashed Laravel. Eric saw the tweet, then noticed Steve appearing on multiple other podcasts that same week. The next episode: “You’ll never guess who was on Voices of the Elephant… fucking Steve.” A legend was born from a single critical tweet.

The British Education System vs. Dyslexia

Both Steve and Mike share stories of being told in school to “do something with your hands” because of dyslexia. Mike was held back in maths despite excelling at it, finishing work while the teacher was still explaining to the class. Decades later, both are thriving developers. Take that, 90s education system.

Streaming Philosophy: Mistakes Are Features

Steve’s approach to educational content is refreshingly honest: take advanced concepts, explain them clearly, and when things go wrong (which they will), work through it live. After 10+ years of development, he still makes typos and mistakes constantly. The point isn’t perfection—it’s showing less experienced developers that imposter syndrome is normal and mistakes are just part of the process.

The Great Date Format Debate

Mike once spent an hour debugging code before Joe pointed out: “You’ve got your date and month the wrong way around.” Carbon doesn’t care that you’re British. The team regularly argues about spelling (it’s “colour” with a U, thank you), and Steve has a simple solution: “I build APIs. You don’t need a pretty date from me. You just need some data.”

AI as a Shortcut, Not a Crutch

ChatGPT is useful when you understand what it’s giving you back. Steve uses it to skip tedious debugging, but he knows when the AI invents PHP functions that don’t exist. The new Laravel error page lets you copy errors as markdown and paste them directly into your LLM—proper copy-pasta coding, but with comprehension.