“When I started writing PHP…” is a nice look at how PHP ecosystem has changed in the last 20 years. Those of us who have been using it since then, are guaranteed to drop a nostalgic tear.
The running joke “you’re not a real PHP developer until you’ve written your own CMS and discarded it” wasn’t a joke yet. It was just becoming reality, but it wasn’t old enough yet to be a joke. (Yes, I wrote my own CMS and discarded it.)