[wdvltalk] Re: A recap

[John Nichel]

My story starts all the way back in the early 80's. It was Christmas of '80 or '82 when I got an Atari 600XL for a present, and taught myself BASIC. I was hooked on computers for the next few years, but kind of lost touch in '86 when I went into the Navy. I got out of the service in '92, and worked as an electrician up until January of '96 when I had an accident on the job, resulting in a two broken vertebrae. While I was laid up, a friend of mine brought me an old (old now) 486DX/66 to help me pass the days. Running Windows 3.1 and Netscape 3.01 Gold (remember those?), I stumbled onto Geocities, and signed up for my "very own home page".

Back when I was playing around with BASIC, I was never satisfied with something just worked...I wanted to know the how's and why's, and I wanted to know how to write it myself. This same feeling held true when I made my first site. Lying around the house for 8 months with my injury, I spent about every waking minute learning HTML and JavaScript.

In October of '96, I was informed about an entry level web job at a place called T.C. Computers here in New Orleans. I applied for it, got it, and was making $8.00 an hour keeping a company's site updated. During my first two years there, I started getting more and more interested in not only the Open Source movement, but the back end of web development, and less interested in layout / design. By the time Insight bought out T.C. Computers in 1998, I was already quite an proficient Perl programmer, and fairly versed with PostgreSQL.

In October of '99, Insight decided to close down T.C. in New Orleans, and move the whole operation to Phoenix, AZ. Shortly after arriving in Arizona, I was put in the lead of a team charged with converting Insight's web site, done in a legacy, in-house programming language over to php. Prior to this, I had never really heard of php, but quickly fell in love with it. Once that project was done, I was tasked with coordinating the web side integration of the new order processing system that was being written in Java, which helped me learn not only some Java, but how to code better using OOP in php.

This new knowledge helped me land a job back in Louisiana for a company who needed someone to revamp their IT department, specifically their programming style (bring them out of the dark ages as the CTO told me). After a year of fighting with old school scripters, we are at today where my team and I have converted old Perl scripts, some asp, and alot of SSI over to a php middle tier, and a C++ back end, with well documented code, strict coding standards, and fine tuned scope documents for all projects.

All because of Geocities, Rush, Mt. Dew, and an on the job injury. Who would have thunk it?

--
By-Tor.com
It's all about the Rush
http://www.by-tor.com


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