I’m a web developer by trade, but I had very little (if any) formal training. I picked things up here and there as I went. Part of that is because I was in the business early enough that everyone was learning as they went. People (looking at YOU Netscape) were literally making things up as they went to see what worked. Here are some important events that made my career pivot.
Learning HTML
In late 1994 my college got access to the World Wide Web. This meant we could use the Lynx browser on a dumb terminal connected to a VAX VMS machine in the back room. It was pretty cool, but I still liked Gopher better.
One day a friend named James came into the computer lab and said “Hey, look what I made!” and it was a web page! I was floored, I had no idea we could make those. It was just an HTML file on the mainframe, no web server at all.
He said “You should make one too.”
and I said “I could never figure that stuff out.”
and he said “Sure you can, it’s easy, let me show you.”
And that afternoon I learned every HTML tag there was, because there were only about 40. HTML2 wasn’t quite out yet.
It was amazing. Breathtaking. I thought about it day and night. I read about it. I made notes and stuck them in my back pocket so much that it got thicker than my wallet.
Many thanks to James.
Learning MySQL
I learned this pretty differently from most folks I expect. In 1997 I got a job at Gospelcom doing support, and things like user accounts were stored in MySQL. I was given an SGI Indy desktop computer, running the Irix operating system, shown how to SSH to our various servers, and given a crash course in the MySQL command line client. How to choose a database, view a table, find things in it, edit them, etc.
It wasn’t that hard, and I got quite good at it. This gave me a HUGE advantage when I later started making database driven web sites.
Thanks to Brian my boss for showing me how and answering a zillion questions.
Learning Server Side Includes
In 1997 I think I found Server Side Includes provided by Apache. They could do a little data rendering, but the thing I used them most for was including template parts. They looked like this:
<!--#include virtual="/footer.html" -->
They made it so when I needed to change a navigation section or footer info I only had to do it in one place. This saved me an enormous amount of time.
I don’t remember who showed me this, but it was probably a co-worker at Gospelcom.
Learning PHP
In 1999 I was working at my desk at Gospelcom and Carlos came in and said
“Hey guys, I have a side contract that needs PHP, anyone want to partner with me?”
PHP was just coming into its own, with php3 having been released just 6 months before. There was no php2. I really wanted to learn it, so I said
“I’ll do it!”
That evening I went to devshed.com (it’s gone now, don’t go there) and tutorial number 1 was how to use PHP to get data from MySQL. In about 30 minutes I had built a little thing to get data from MySQL and print it to the screen. Again breathtaking. The possibilities seemed endless.
I bought the PHP Pocket Reference from O’Reilly and read it cover to cover many times, learning every function PHP had. Don’t get that book now, the latest edition is from 2000.
Say what you wish about PHP, it turned me from an HTML markup dev to a programmer.
Thanks to Carlos for the push.
Learning CSS
I first saw the concept of CSS when a friend showed me Internet Explorer 1.0 which came with Windows Plus! He had made a link that was a color other than blue. I didn’t get it at first because people were mostly applying styles to individual tags. Eventually I saw how you could set styles from another file and have them apply everywhere.
I struggled to really understand it though, so in the early 2000’s I got my boss to send me to a class taught by my friend Joel at Gospelcom, and he made everything clear.
After that, CSS became one of my favorite parts of web dev for about 8 years. Then I looked away for a couple months and when I looked back plain CSS was not really a thing anymore. It needed Grunt and Gulp and it was being compiled and had turned into SASS and SCSS and half a dozen other things.
I went back to PHP and have pretty much stayed there ever since.
Many thanks to Joel for his patience.
Learning WordPress
Much of my learning stagnated in the 2000’s. I felt like there wasn’t much new to learn. I didn’t want to bother with Javascript, the only thing people were using it for was popup banner ads.
In 2009 a friend asked me to work on a WordPress site. I had tried using it before and wasn’t that impressed. I was able to make it do some things I wanted, but it just wasn’t quite there yet.
Then in 2010 two important things happened. First I quit my job and went freelance. Second, WordPress 3.0 came out with Custom Post Types. Custom Post Types turned WordPress from a blog into a CMS.
Since CPTs were relatively new, very few people knew how to make them or leverage them properly. My 12 years of PHP experience gave me a big leg up here, and I went all in.
Now I’ve been doing WordPress work for 15 years, feeding my family, making my soul sing.
Thanks to Steve for asking me to do that first site, and thanks to everyone who’s ever worked on WordPress.
Everything Else
That’s pretty much it for technology that changed my career. Many other things have changed it, but they were experiential. Meeting people, going places, seeing and hearing things. Lots of those things fade from memory, but the technology that made it all work is still findable on the web.
