I was hired by Travelocity in late 2007 to be a designer, but I displayed some coding proficiency. I had taught myself the suite of XML related technologies th

I was hired by Travelocity in late 2007 to be a designer, but I displayed some coding proficiency. I had taught myself the suite of XML related technologies the year before. They could not find competent UI developers no matter how hard they tried, so I was involuntarily transferred to a front-end developer role in early 2008 (age 28). I have been doing it full time ever since. Most of my code and learning come from open source projects opposed to my full time work in the corporate world. As somebody who is self-taught and has maintained two jobs in unrelated careers/industries I have 0 sympathy and 0 patience for developers who do this work full-time yet still cannot figure it out without some framework to do their jobs for them. The general incompetence, immaturity, and accompanying excuses that seem to plague front-end development is really the worst part of the work.