Hey there, I’ve been learning Slim for a few days now. I’ve got to say, it’s actually helped me learn a lot of components I struggled with when trying to learn Laravel 5.3 .
I have a question however. Is learning Slim going to be useful in a freelance career? And how about in startups? I do need to start my career soon… And that too through freelancing. Of course, learning Slim properly will make me understand Laravel, which I was struggling with, and Laravel is indeed economically viable. However, is it likely that I would have opportunities to code in Slim? Of course, I mean with dependencies pulled in using composer, since PHP packages makes life a lot easier.
Thanks!
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I think that as a freelancer, being able to work in any framework is a key ability.
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Thanks Mr. Allen 
However, do you feel I might be at a disadvantage compared to someone who learned something like codeigniter (old, dying, yet still used ) ? As in, would there be too few Slim jobs and too many applicants? I’ve read that people pour in on PHP job offers at Elance and Upwork, and thus there’s a large competition disproportional to the number of available vanilla PHP offers.
I only wonder if it would be extremely difficult (or worse, impossible) for me to get work as a freelancer with no experience, when it comes to using the Slim framework. While I wouldn’t regret spending time on Slim regardless, it would be nice if I could monetise the skills I develop.
Well, learning Slim will improve your skills (the concepts it uses will be used by any modern framework), so it’s a good investment anyhow.
As for being economically viable, I’ve switched to Slim for most my programming jobs and am doing fine with it. Having said this, I focus on custom/complex implementations where the choice of platform is a lesser concern than if you have to implement a stock company site. My customers are happy I can provide a solution and don’t really care about the platform used.
Most PHP jobs are platform specific, so from that perspective Slim may not be the best choice since you can’t really propose to use Slim if the customer wants “A new corporate website based on Laravel/Wordpress”. However, if you can break out of that mold, Slim is IMHO a great choice.
Bottom line: it all depends on your ability to find the right type of jobs and market yourself properly to your customers about being able to deliver. I’d have to agree with @akrabat that you don’t want to be a Slim-only guy … learn a number of frameworks and you’'ll be able to find work easily as long as you can deliver a quality solution.
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@TheLobos, Thanks! I tend to overthink things, even though I’m convinced that learning Slim has really helped me understand modern frameworks and MVC patterns.
So it’s now decided. I’ll build sample websites with Slim, and try to convince clients who request pure PHP pages to try the Slim framework. After using Slim, I simply cannot go back to writing vanilla PHP. The framework is simple and clean, all with excellent documentation and ample packages on github for just about anything.
Of course, as soon as I’m really confident with the framework, I’ll move on to Laravel and friends. I enjoy learning, so the prospect of continuously learning and tinkering with new frameworks/CMS/libraries is exciting.
Again, thank you. It’s certainly a huge boost to see someone who professionally does use this framework and recommends learning it.
That I definitely agree with. I think that unless you are a masochist, the days of using plain PHP are long since gone 
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There are some additional reasons to convince your customer on that point, because vanilla php almost lays in coder styles and that projects always are more difficult to switch from one developer to another.
One strong value in frameworks is that demands to code using normalized styles, and that means benefits by doing things clever and quickly.
My first look at frameworks was fat free framework, and it was easy and light; but when I have discovered Slim It was enough to convince me that this is the real way to make php apps.
So now I have slim as my base to work and it’s great.
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I must firstly apologize for the late response. I’ve been diving into other areas of web development and was totally out of sync with PHP and Slim.
But thanks, I really feel from the experiences I’ve had the past few months, that this is the way to go. PHP can be a great platform for web development. But that depends on how it’s used. I can write some horrible CGI with Ruby, but people would consider me crazy for doing so. Just as I would use Rails or Sinatra if I were to make a web app using Ruby, I SHOULD use packages like Slim, respect-validate, and the likes, or a full blown framework like Laravel for building a web app.
Also, being able to convince clients is a necessary skill I must develop as a freelancer.
Cheers.