Experienced Web Developer From Southampton, UK
My first experience with programming started with good old Windows batch files, at the time I played a lot of Source Engine games, and with that came Source Recorder, a built in recorder for recording your gaming footage, the way that worked is you would set a framerate, and it would basically take screenshots as fast as that framerate. That in turn would create thousands of png files in the game's directory, so I experiemented with batch files to delete them all once I was done compiling them into videos (you can watch one of these videos here) crazy that video is 13 years old and I still play that game a bit now!
During my time of playing Source games, I learnt how to do mapping (creating maps in the game engine) and from that I started making tutorial videos and putting them on Youtube, one of them has around 40,000 views! Shortly after starting that an online friend approached me and said he get me a website setup so I can post articles on it about the tutorials I was doing, and that is where I heard about PHP...
Learning PHP was hard! I had no experience with anything like it beforehand and so learning everything from scratch took a long time, I started off by making stupid website ideas and using vanilla PHP with HTML and CSS and connecting it all to a mysql database. Later on I started looking into PHP frameworks and the first one I used was CodeIgniter I found it incredibly as for the first time it made it easy to get data from the database without having to write loads of SQL, after that I went onto Laravel and absolutely loved it, it made working with PHP a real joy. I learned enough of it to land my first job as a junior PHP developer working on massive sites and I was thrown into the deepend.
Over the last few years I have worked on a massive amount of projects big and small and I really enjoy doing what I do, but one challenge I have found with web development is how the industry is constantly changing and so as developer I have to stay on top of it or risk missing out on the cool new technologies. Currently I'm getting into NodeJs, ReactJs, and VueJs... see a pattern there? yep, all javascript based frameworks. Some people say they find working with Javascript to be a bit of a challenge, but compared to PHP, I have found it super interesting to work with and hope to work with it more in the future.