I grew up during the early days of personal computers. Our first PC was a Commodore 64 and only had DOS. Back then everything was done via the command line including playing games which were text based. Because my father had been working in the IT field since before I was born, computers were always part of my life. I can remember him bringing home punch cards and telling us that they spelled out our name.

Developing My First Program

During the 80s when I was a teenager I became curious about programming. I found a book explaining how to write a simple program in basic and began to teach myself. I wasn’t great at it but I did manage to create a simple text game.

My First Computer

Young people today would find it hard to imagine but people my age and older didn’t have computers in college. We had a computer lab with a dozen PCs that we could share. Windows came out around the time I got into college but I didn’t really learn much about it until I got my first computer after I graduated. It was a PC with Windows 3.1. I quickly became accustomed to the whole Windows environment and learned Word, and Excel. Not long after I began dabbling with Excel’s macro language and created some complex macro programs.

Self Taught Web Design

In 1999, after getting a BS in Biology and working for 7 years in a genetics research lab, I discovered my love of web design. I started out building a web site purely in HTML. The goal of the web site was to help musicians and fans connect. Being a musician this was something I’ve been very passionate about my whole adult life. And that passion is what fueled my desire to build a web site and learn HTML and CSS design skills. Back then there wasn’t any such entity as W3C, all the browsers treated CSS completely differently, and browsers handled JavaScript very differently making it a real challenge. Thankfully today that has changed but these early experiences with web design give me a true appreciation of how far we’ve come.

Self Taught Web Development

By 2001 my early music website had become so popular that I had thousands of visitors a month and got lots of emails to correct their information. Since all the pages (some 100 or so) were all hand coded HTML it was very time consuming to make updates. I quickly came to the realization that I needed to learn web programming and build something that would allow the users to update their information themselves. I tried out several of the early open source content management systems which taught me a lot about PHP development. From these CMS I also began learning database design and became familiar with MySQL.

Freelancing

When 2003 rolled around, I found that I wanted to build my own PHP CMS which seemed like the next step for me to hone my PHP development skills. I freelanced for several years and worked on my own projects including building my first CMS. The code wasn’t done the best way but it got the job done. The further I went with my own projects the more I realized I needed to start learning about object oriented programming. PHP 5 had just come out at this point but since I was just starting to learn OOP design I didn’t fully grasp the reasons to switch from PHP4 to PHP5. I had however figured out the gist of OOP design in PHP4 and began rebuilding my CMS as an OOP CMS.

Becoming A ColdFusion Developer

During 2007, I decided that freelancing wasn’t really right for me, so I began looking for a full time job in the web development field. Though I was looking for a PHP job, a great ColdFusion job came along that I decided to take. I had always thought I’d like to learn ColdFusion so this was an opportunity to do so and it was with a small web development firm so it gave me an opportunity to really hone my web design and development skills further.

Transitioning Back to PHP

In 2011 after 4 years developing web sites with ColdFusion, I decided I wanted to go back to PHP. I was fortunate to find some great contracting opportunities developing web sites with PHP5 OOP design methods. I have acquired more skills and experience with LAMP environments, as well as, learning how to take full advantage of all that PHP5 has to offer especially for object oriented programming.

Maturing My Development Skills

Within a year I found a great full-time job at a University where I have been able to shape and guide our web development standards and processes, bring our server infrastructure from way behind average to cutting edge, and architect some web applications that have proven critical to our success. I lead implementation of version control, production and non-production server environments, automated unit testing, CI/CD pipelines, SCRUM, and more. I’ve learned everything from Docker, Vagrant, Jenkins to using AWS services like S3, EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda, API Gateway, CloudWatch, CloudFormation Templates, and more. My coding has gone from about average with no automated unit testing and really long hard to follow methods to S.O.L.I.D. very readable high quality code with nearly 100% code coverage. While working here, I have matured as a developer and as a leader.