My story is probably similar to many other web developers out there, but I like where I’ve been and where I see myself going. I started designing web pages as soon as I discovered the Internet. When I was 12 my parents bought a brand new Windows 95 computer and purchased good ol’ dial-up through Earthlink (I am surprised I remembered that). I recall visiting just a few web pages and somehow discovered the view source option.
As soon as I saw the weird code I became interested and thought to myself, wouldn’t it be cool to make my own web page…So the next time I was with my mom picking out a movie to rent, I wandered over to the book section of the store and begged my mom to buy a $40 book on web design (I still own this book today, though its filled with so much writing that it’s nearly illegible). After reluctantly agreeing on helping her clean the house, she bought the book.
With the book in front of me I set out, but hit a snag…I didn’t know about web hosting and found a free provider…no not geocities, I was and angelfire user through and through… At the time I did not realize that I was able to create a web page and test it out on my computer first. After this came learning about ftp. I used WSFTP…but now I use Filezilla, if not DreamWeaver’s built in ftp, which is too slow for my liking…
My first web page was a Nintendo 64 cheat code site, which, I am afraid to say plagiarized ign.com terribly, but hey, what does a 12 year old know about that? This site was basically an image map, which was my first “big project” that I created in Jasc Paint Shop Pro…when that was free… Then I let that site go because it didn’t interest me enough…
My next site was SimStation… which is partially backed up and viewable here. Its not used or active, its just stored there… It was actually very popular and was the first and most popular “User link” on simcity.com, but when they removed hat section of the site, my traffic dropped considerably and I let the site expire… Not bad for a 15 year old!
I then went on a hiatus for a few years and delved into Flash, then went to college and majored in Computer Science and minored in Multimedia. During this time I created another personal site and then got hired as an entry level IT position for a local manufacturer. This did not last long as I started this site and business and then got hired as a Lead Web and Multimedia developer for a prominent university in Nebraska.
I remember hearing about CSS and thinking that it will never be popular. I was quite wrong in that statment because every design I make now uses CSS to control the layout. My favorite development language has got to be PHP and implementing it into a SQL database is a kind of “love” of mine now. For work I have dived deaper into ASP.NET than I ever thought possible and recently I have been working through XML and XSLT code…DHTML, AJAX….WOW there is a near infinite fountain of knowledge to acquire! The problem is that when I learn everything tha exists today, I will have 20 other things to learn as well!
So, this is my simple, yet intricate path to where I am today… How did you get into web development?
