Developer skills

While I'm not a fan of certifications and the sort, it's definitely helpful for a novice developer to have a scale to measure himself against. Something that answers the question "what do I need to learn?"

The guys from clean-code-developer.de do a decent job of defining stages and methods to assert yourself. I would suggest to anyone to try to follow it for a while. It's harder than it seems.

When it comes to PHP development, there is also phptherightway.com with a nice collection of best practices and tools. Anyway, this is how my list of skills and tools would look like:

1. Version Control System (subversion, git, github)
2. Testing (phpunit, tdd, bdd)
3. Debugging (xdebug)
4. Dependency Management (composer, packagist)
5. Best Practices (clean code/r, design patterns, beautiful code)