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I'd rather not divulge too much as far as details/places/companies, but the basics of my career is something like this: - Played around with making websites fr
by Andrenid 12y ago
I'd rather not divulge too much as far as details/places/companies, but the basics of my career is something like this:
- Played around with making websites from the very early days of the web (gray backgrounds, black text, blue/purple links, <hr>'s everywhere, that kinda thing).. mostly personal projects and small sites for friends/family. Did this for many years, until discovering dynamic content via CGI scripts.
- Got obsessed with CMSes.. Red Dot, PHP-Nuke, rolling my own CGI scripts, DHTML, then PHP etc. Small hobby turned into obsession.
- In the mid/late 90s I started doing freelance websites for local businesses. Family contacts, local shops, etc.
- Mid 2000s quite my retail management career and started a small business with a friend, still just doing websites for local shops, friends of friends.
- Did a few contracts for larger companies (TelCos, local Gov't), fixing up their websites or installing CMSes (WordPress, Drupal, SharePoint).
- One of those Gov't contracts was a 3 mth contract to redesign and rebuild their website from scratch (static HTML site to a large Drupal multi-server deal), they really liked me, hired me full time for more money than I'd ever made in my life, to manage the website and build a decent sized web team, which I've done ever since.
Everything I learned was from books, IRC and Google (.. and before that, AltaVista, Compuserve, etc). I've never done any courses or education past dropping out of high school. I just live, breathe, sweat and crap Web. Subscribe to hundreds of RSS feeds and blogs, have 100-odd books, etc.
I don't think not knowing CS ever held me back, but I definitely hit problems I couldn't solve without that knowledge (Sorting/searching data, the maths side of JS, etc).. I've just been lucky enough to know some really REALLY good programmers to trade help for beer, when it comes to those problems. Those friends have shown me how amazing CS is beyond web stuff, and for a decade now I've been meaning to learn to do "proper" programming and kept putting it off.