Hello people.
My name is Aric Caley, and I have been developing in PHP since the early days.
I've survived both meltdowns.. first the dot com implosion and then the recession (at that time I was developing software for mortgage companies.. ).
I've use many frameworks over the years and when I started developing my own project, I initially started writing the backend API using Symfony. Since I generally like to start by designing a database first, I then found myself writing a lot of boring boilerplate code to create an API into my database.
Then I discovered Dreamfactory.
I ditched my custom code and brought up a VM of Dreamfactory. Since then I've been able to focus almost entirely on just developing my mobile app, using Dreamfactory as my backend.
I'm also proxying several other services through my Dreamfactory VM, like geosvc.com, ionic framework's APIs, Mailgun, Stripe.com and others.