Personally I think Symfony (and digging around its source) helped me become a far better software developer. It wasn't perfect, but it was awesome at the time.

Personally I think Symfony (and digging around its source) helped me become a far better software developer. It wasn't perfect, but it was awesome at the time. I built some really cool applications with it early on. Over ten years ago now! No doubt about it though, some very talented people contributed to that project and I imagine they still do. Symfony was one of the lights in the dark if you ask me; PHP could be a very ugly thing at the time, but it proved that you could do great things with it by applying good practices and being diligent about reviewing and improving designs. One of the things that blew me away (I was pretty green at the time) was when they made all of Symfony modular, and other frameworks began consuming their components. The portability of all of it was so impressing and inspiring to me back then. Anyway, plenty of ways to criticize PHP and Symfony, but I think they did a stellar job. I built my career on that stuff. I haven't actually looked at it in quite a while, though.