Ye' old general discussion board. Basically, for everything that isn't covered elsewhere. Come here to shoot the breeze, shoot your mouth off, or whatever suits your fancy. This forum is not for asking programming related questions.
Had my first internet connection in 1996 in was addicted to IRC. The cool guys had bots and websites... So i wanted those too.. Quickly learned copy-pasting and "save this document as html" with word.. There, i had made my first website
Ok, everywhere i surfed i read that you have to write the html yourself if you want to be cool... So that was my next challenge... After a while i got the hang of it.. in 1998 i had an introduction into programming course at the university and i really got the hang of it It was time to write my first CGI program (with turbo pascal).. I quickly switched to perl and started to skip a lot of courses (i became addicted to writing scripts).
A couple of friends (well, they were cyberjunkies too) and i started our own tetrinet.be website and i got root access to our very own server (and old p1-100mhz with 64mb ram). I learned a bit of bash, java and c++ because i had the impression these allowed me to achieve the same results with less effort. I also decided to drop perl for php because most webhosts allowed php (but not perl).
After a while i had the feeling it had outgrown all that stuff and decided to move on. Currently i only have to complete a three month internship (win32/mfc programming and/or php) and i'll finally have my bachelor in informatics (i'm still an information junk but i got it all under control. eg: when my girlfriend stays over, i don't feel the need to check my e-mail. I can leave my computer powered off for a week without becoming nervous.. Too bad that others start to think that i'm dead when that happens )
programming in PHP for hobby, have done some 'volunteer' work for a friends eTailer (i.e. didn't get paid, but the bits I did only took 15mins )
Done very little with Java in a professional sense but have a keen interest in the language, but am far from proficient at it.
Have 3 years VB6 experience in one of my many job roles in this company, also some JSP was thrown in for good measure and bits and pieces from others (bash, C and even PowerBuilder!)
In reality I started off making my very first website when tripod started getting big. I was like, WOW I CAN MAKE MY OWN!!!??? Then I was like, wait...how do you do this from a blank page!? I learned the basic HTML stuff and made my most successful website on tripod that summer. It was a anti-teletubbies website where I killed them in all sorts of ways and whatnot. Soooooo much fun, at my peak I got about 1500 hits a day average (max was like 5000 unique hits in a day) which is more than any other personal site I have ever done since then AND it was my first ever! God, I still can remember the angry e-mails - my child cried for 135087 hours because of your website blah blah blah. You would think that a website with the title 'Kill Teletubbies' would not be clicked on by parents surfing the web with their 3 year old but hey, I am no parent.
After that my dad was like hey, why not learn some basic since thats what he did in college. So I learned some of that but basically learned more about programming. Then I learned a little VB but it was not to be. Thats when I was like, I am going to figure out what the 'submit' button does and how to do it myself (gosh darn it)!
I went to Barns-n-nobel (or whatever) with my bro and I was talking about some website stuff and he was like hey, if you want a book on this stuff I will buy you one. I was like asp... php... asp... php... guess what I picked?
Now, I do php for a living. Life will never be the same because I did not like the tele-tubbies and my bro was kind enough to fork over 25 bucks. I guess I should pay him back eh?
I omitted the VB section of my story because I didn't feel it was terribly relevant, but thinking back I'm pretty sure that's what started it all. When I was a kid my dad put me in front of VB 3 or 4 (we had it on like 11 floppy disks) and gave me a book and I just started following the instructions. Ever since then computers have captivated me. Looking back it's strange such a "non-language" (for lack of a better word) could have such a huge effect on me.
I was manager of a steel plant and was tired of watching my machine operators performing a tedious arithmetic calculation for a machine setup that often took as much as 45 minutes. They not infrequently got it wrong and, after spending an hour or more setting the machine up, would have to start the process all over again. I felt that a computer could do the job faster and more accurately but could not find anybody to do the programming. The programmers could not understand the machine process, and those who were familiar with the machine process didn't know programming.
I bought an IMB PC with two floppy disk drives and 32 Kb of RAM (this was in 1981, the year IBM introduced the PC) and a UCSD Pascal programming system and taught myself how to program. The routine I came up with worked very nicely -- setups took a matter of seconds and it never made mistakes.
I switched to C in 82, VC++ in 84 and became a full-time self-employed programmer in 90. My work is about half VC++ and half Internet now, but I'm semi-retired.
I started my first website ages ago in college. Hosted on Geocites. It was about UK Underground music and was quite sucesful.
I wanted to bring databases into play and made a start with access + ASP but then I found PHP + MySql and saw how great it was (and the hosting was cheaper) so I made my choice.
I got hooked and now I am running my own website design company and working full time for a company doing their website.
I used to be a brilliant musician, I could play about 8 instruments to a pretty good level and I was hoping to be a professional musician, maybe playing in an orchestra or something. Then it happened...
I was meant to be revising for my GCSEs (exams at 16 years old in england) in 2000 when i decided it would be more fun to make a website about Rollercoaster Tycoon (classic game!!!!) on Tripod. One thing led to another, I learnt HTML, Javascript, Perl (why not dive in at the deep end!) then I noticed how a lot of sites had pages ending with .php. It interested me and I wanted to know what was behind it. My website quickly became one of the biggest and most respected rollercoaster websites on the net because of it's searchability etc that PHP was able to bring to it.