zabuch

I hope that using CLI will actually give better results (on top of being easier to test!) as this allows for testing just PHP - ignoring the whole stack. To mitigate testing using just "wall clock", I repeat tests hundreds of times and then drop 50% slowest results. At the end I calculate the average and standard deviation. I review standard deviation values to spot any weird results. I also try to make sure that the machines that are running the tests are as good as they can: they don't run any GUI, all services including cron are disabled, I run the same test at different hours, etc.

You may find it difficult to believe but I personally know and worked with a guy, who has decided to start work in IT when he was 32. With absolutely no prior experience in IT, after few years he became quite decent developer. He is nearly 40 now and he is still coding.