For as long as I can remember, I have been interested in some form of computer programming. I was once handed a magazine with the source code of a small turn-based game printed over three pages in BASIC. While the motives may have been a bit nefarious (if an 8-year old is transcribing page after page of code, he is quite occupied), I really have not stopped programming for fun and profit since then.
After BASIC, I picked up a "Web Pages for Dummies" book and earned a $50 savings bond for mantaining a rural west Tennessee bank's Web site (no longer uses my design, of course). For a time, I had Macromedia Flash for a few small projects, and eventually landed with ASP when my family moved to Nashville with the first version of Macromedia UltraDev. This opened an entirely new world of development for me because it helped me create dynamic, data-driven Web sites. I used it for a quite a few applications written for the Microsoft SQL and ASP\VBScript tandem.
After working on a few projects (a competitive fuel price survey for a conveneince store chain and the multi-enterprise intranet portal that served as its delivery platform), I went to college hoping to learn even more about how to put all of this to good use. Unfortunately, I soon learned that such things are not taught in college courses, and any heavy programming skills are not even touched until you are an upperclassman (COBOL, anyone?) Also, I learned that the educational environment was not willing to shell out the dollars for a Microsoft SQL platform, and generally discouraged anything that ran on their much maligned IIS platform.
I asked for a meeting with the Computer Services group at the university to discuss plans for a Web site for The Pacer, the student newspaper on campus. Coming from my Microsoft-friendly background, I wanted to create the site using some concepts that I had developed along the way. In fact, the first draft of the site (less most of the design elements) was complete. I left the meeting a bit disappointed after being told that a) you could not run any ASP application on a university Web server and b) no matter how much I begged and pleaded, I would not be able to provide my own server to connect in to the network. It was PHP and MySQL or the highway.
It would have been easier to to just say "Sorry guys, no luck; Find somebody who knows this stuff." Instead, I downloaded a plugin for Ultradev (the academic version was much cheaper) and converted all of my original code over to PHP. It was rough looking, but it was just in time for the 2002-03 academic year. It received a refresh less than a year later, and would go mostly unchanged for the entire time that I served as the paper's Executive Editor until Spring of 2006. The site was abadonded in favor of College Publisher over the winter holiday of 2006. Because I am a bit of a source code packrat, "Content Manager" (its unimaginative name) lives on as an Open Source project.
Nowadays, I am still working with PHP, and have added PostgreSQL to my arsenal of database platforms. I am fairly excited about AJAX and the idea of popular Web services offering APIs. A month or two ago I finished a Google Maps integration for Des-Case Corporation's distributor directory. I have a love affair with WordPress because of the neat stuff you can do with the platform without modifying any of the existing code.
Through all of this, my greatest pleasure has not come from the finished project but the problem solving that goes into writing an application that achieves exactly what you set out to do. Some people like crosswords or chess, but I thrive on debugging 1,200 lines of code for that pesky semicolon that is bringing everything to a screeching halt. It is just a different way of thinking.
Speaking of "[Thinking] Different", Samantha says our new OS X DVDs have shipped from Memphis. W00t!