We have a packed discussion about a set of really outstanding pieces this week, as Malik and I get together again to chat about this week's Top 7 Articles on dev.to.

To kick it off, we have "The Three Stages of a Developer", which discuesses the three broad stages and attitudes you may experience as you progress through a career in development.

After that, we move on to "Teaching Functional Programming: Two Big Approaches", where Ed Toro gives readers two broad frameworks through which to understand functional programming, along with a brisk history lesson and some practical examples.

In "Things Nobody Told Me About Being a Software Engineer", the author details a concrete list of practical lessons she learned over her career so far, both technical and social, which spurred a conversation between Malik and I that probably could've lasted a week. Really a must-read.

Moving on, we discuss an interesting new project launched on dev.to, launched in the post "Gitote is out now!", and talk about the value of community-driven projects.

With "The Unix way... or why you actually want to use Vim", we talk about one user's thoughts on the core strengths of Vim and the Unix Philosophy, and how that relates to our previous conversations on composability...

which leads us very naturally into a dense, excellent post on "Exploring Vim", in which the author walks through a brief history of Vim, his own journey with it, and tips on _ starting with it & sticking with it_.

Finally, we discuss "Awesome PHP Resources on DEV 🚀 🎉 🎢", a piece that points you to all the various resources right here on dev.to that you'd need to go from 0-60 as a PHP developer.

our "Host's Choice" choice for the week is "Developer eXperience: error messages", a systematic comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of various languages from the developer quality of life perspective.

Did we say anything completely incorrect or make any mistakes? Bonus points if you find them all.

What was your personal journey into ~darkness~ Vim?

Do you have any reflections you'd like to share from your career?

Let us know in the comments!

We're still experimenting with post formats, audio, etc., so if you have any thoughts, feel free to let us know here, or on Twitter at @dangolant and @milkstarz.