This post started out as a placeholder to show me what the front page would look like, but the time has come to replace it with a story about my early coding years.

Expectation vs Reality

Like so many Smart Kids™ in the 90s I assumed I’d be a computer programmer at some point. And I did take a lot of programming classes in high school and college! But I never really did anything outside of class. You see I never learned any GUI frameworks, so I was only really able to make command line console apps.

The All-Nighter

My relationship to coding changed in 2012. I was underemployed, and looking for another gig to ease the budget. I came across an ad for a part-time web developer working mostly in WordPress customization. The position would be using PHP, but the ad said lack of prior knowledge wouldn’t be a deal-breaker for a fast learner. After a little research about PHP, I decided to apply.

I submitted my application on a Wednesday, and then on Friday I called the number to “make sure it came through okay”. The response was something like “Yeah, I see that came through, but I’m about to be out of town for the weekend so I won’t have time to look at applications until Monday.”

I had a whole weekend to learn PHP!

I picked up a book from the local library on LAMP stack web development and spent the whole weekend working my way through the creation of a very primitive form-based PHP web app. It was ugly (tons of <fieldset> elements, essentially no styling), and it had no JavaScript and no database connection (all the data was stored in $_SESSION), but it worked! And I got the job.

Synergy

When I started learning to develop for the web, I realized that the HTML and CSS I’d been learning on the side just for fun had actually been the GUI framework I’d been missing all along! After that, I was off to the races. I still don’t know my way around Swing or GTK, but I’ve made a good living these last ten years writing code for the operating system that is your web browser.