My journey as a programmer is roughly as follows...
1995. Hack together websites on Geocities and get insanely jealous at my friend’s mastery of table layouts. The first website I ever built was a tribute to my then-girlfriend. Sweet right? And gross.
1998. Now flash is the cool thing. Learned a bit of actionscript and won a design award for this 3D isometric flash animation I did. Got into a magazine, you know, the ones made of paper.
2001. Basically spent my whole time at university ignoring my accounting lectures and building random stuff on the LAMP stack in my dorm room with the lights off.
2002. Still hacking things together in PHP I launched something called sketchplanet which let anyone draw these tiny sketches online in black and white. Like Draw Something before we had iPhones. It got featured on the TV show Attack of the Show and blew up my server.
2006. Started using Codeigniter and learned what MVC architecture was. This sped up my development quite a bit. I launched a bunch of stuff using the CI framework, including Open Source Food, a recipe site that got quite popular and was then acquired.
2010. Was sort of forced to learn Rails at a new job. It totally bamboozled me at first but I was lucky enough to be mentored by some really fantastic Rails engineers who worked there.
2012. Rails is now my framework of choice. Migrations, scaffolding etc - these new concepts and more really helped me be super productive. With Rails I launched about 4 or 5 different web apps to production over the next few years.
2018. I’ve dabbled a bit with Ember but I think I’m too old and stubborn now, and I prefer writing ruby over js. Rails 5 can pretty much do anything I throw at it.
That’s it! Nowhere in here did I take any courses or do any formal study. The two most significant factors were 1) have something you really *really* want to build, and 2) you will need some technical mentorship at some point to learn best practices etc
I’d like to hear your coding journey too - do share! 🤓
