I was in junior high (7th or 8th grade) when I got my first desktop computer. It was an “IBM clone” — the TRS-80 model 4 (it had 2 floppy drives!) I played games like Zork and did homework using programs like VisiCalc and WordPerfect. I wrote some pointless programs in BASIC things like:5 cls10 print "Hello World!"20 GOTO 10
One day, approximately in 10th grade, when I had a term paper due I discovered that my WordPerfect disk had gotten demagnetized. So I sat down to write my first real-ish program — an input buffer to LPT1 program — in BASIC. I proceeded to write my 2 page paper 255 characters at a time. Due to the success at writing this simple word processor, I entered our school Science Fair with a program designed to be a math tutor for students in grades 1st-10th. I took an Honorable Mention and went to State (got nothing.)
That summer I worked for the Town of Smithtown Highway Department. It was my first 9-5 job as well as my first real job. In fact it has been my only actual 9 to 5 job since we actually got paid for our lunch hour. My job was simply to learn AutoCad well enough to teach the college kid that was coming in in the fall. They gave me 2 weeks to finish a simple project designed to learn the basics of AutoCad. It took me just under 2 full days. So they gave me something harder to do, and expected it to take a month, but it also took a couple of days, maybe as much as a week but not I doubt it. The rest of the summer was spent much of the same fashion except I learned not to go to them as soon as I finished my project (if I finished my project too early I had to do data entry and file the index cards that fuel reocrds were kept on.)
Fast forward about 6 or 7 years. After a brief hiatus from college I decide to go back so I got my second computer. A Microsoft Windows machine running Windows 3.1 with Norton Desktop Commander. I played some games, I explored some software, but I didn’t really do any codings at all. Except to drop into DOS to write some BASIC and .bat files. I also took 2 courses in Pascal at college, acing them both, even though I missed about 20% of the class sessions. A few years passed in this fashion, including an upgrade to windows 95 and the launch of the public internet. This new-fangled World Wide Web. So I decided to learn how to create one of these so-called web pages. I obtained a copy of Netscape Navigator 3.0 Gold (which included a WYSIWYG editor) and a copy of CoffeeCup HTML editor (back then it was like notepad with color coding.)
I played with the visual and looked at the changes in the code and then I played code and look at the changes in the visual. In this way I taught myself HTML, JavaScript and even some styles (I don’t think css was really around yet.) The years at this point had already advanced to 1997.
In 1998 I got my first “real world” IT job. I was hired as a software tester, but also had to handle help desk support as well as in-house tech support. When they found out I knew HTML they put me in charge of the website also. They had a few CGI form handlers written in Perl for the backend which I also had to edit occasionally but I never did actually learn Perl.
One day they asked me to create a “family of sites we can rebrand and resell to clients.” For this I needed something more dynamic than HMTL and JavaScript could offer at the time. They wanted me to learn ASP. Our SysAdmin refused to allow any Windows/IIS servers on “his” network, and I couldn’t find any good tutorials on ASP anyway, so I told them no. I had explored my options and discovered this young upstart language called PHP. Back then that stood for “Personal Home Page.” PHP was free (as in Beer AND as in speech) it ran under Apache on Linux, and it supported a nice backend database MySQL. So armed only with a marketeers mental concept verbally drafted into loose specs, I sat down to teach myself PHP and MySQL by creating a templated CMS-like website. I also had to create a JavaScript driven template editor so that said marketeer sould create the rebanded sites and try to market them to the potential clients.
Eventually this job ended and I found myself unemployed for a while. During this time I started doing the occasional free lance tasks for friends and family. When finally I found a job, it wasn’t in computers at all, it was in television, but I still found ways to bring code to work projects. I developed an internal mini site to keep track of satellite feed recordings, and although I was the only one to use this system, it helped to make my own job more efficient.
From TV, I moved back into the IT world — to a PHP farm. Our company sold complete website packages with client generated content. This was our fancy way of saying that we grabbed the mambo source code, rebranded it as our own, packaged it up and sold the service (not the software) including hosting and maintenance to our clients, who could then go and populate the site with their own content. We also create a few custom extensions that were sold as add-ons. Once or twice they also got contracted out by major clients to create web apps that were more complex. These “major clients” always ended up not being satisfied with the products we delivered and therefore not paying their bills. The company let go every employee that was not family within a year after I started there. I was the last non-family member to be let go. But I ended up “back on the dole” as they say.
I worked on some small free lance as a favor jobs, and one major under taking. My client was a reseller of folders. A surprising amount of variables go into to pricing these things, let me tell you. I should know, I had to build an in-house custom folder job pricing calculator. I got in way over my head on that one and ended up sub-contracting some assistance from a former co-worker.
He ended up getting me in touch with people at my next job, which is also my current job. The PHP portion of our crew works on creating wikis for our in-house clients, we use MediaWiki’s core code and creating various custom extensions, tags and hooks. After our in-house scientists get done populating these customized wikis, we deliver them either as static HTML dumps or as live wikis, depending upon our various external clients’ needs and requirements. I also dabble in Java and Perl when the needs demand. My primary focus areas have become the data abstraction layer and the data display layer with more of the latter than the former.
Edit 2026: I’ve had 3 other jobs working in the PHP sphere since this post. My current job has lasted 10 years so far, I think it’s a keeper.