Cross post from the blog to here: To be honest, I worked for next to nothing. When I was in college my parents nagged me to death about getting a job. I didn’t

Cross post from the blog to here: To be honest, I worked for next to nothing. When I was in college my parents nagged me to death about getting a job. I didn’t want just any job, and I kept getting rejected from the lowest of the low end positions. I stumbled across an ad at my university looking for web developers at a small company called Cloudspace. I shot them an email with my resume and had an interview that week. The interview was with the owner, and he just asked me to brush up on my PHP and MySQL and come in for a quick test the next week. I crammed my head full of PHP and MySQL tutorials and went in the following week. I had to write a simple page that would query out data for a select box with option groups, each with its own set of options. The task was to select out the data with one query, allow the user to select an option and send a message to the database. I finished it all in about an hour, but hadn’t thought about SQL injection. One single quote and a press of enter and I was done, but they let me take the job anyways. I met the other candidate on the first day we started, and we worked together pretty closely. He had an edge on me, as he knew quite a bit more, but I caught up in the following month. About 2 years passed, and I had went from making minimum wage to making $10 an hour. It wasn’t great, but the experience was well worth it. I left Cloudspace and took on my own contract job. From there, I graduated and went to work at another small company writing ColdFusion (and 12 other things), and from there on to where I work now at one of the largest defense contractors in the world.