I’m 40!

I'm 40. I'm not saying that to brag, I'm not saying it's old, because it's definitely not old. No it's not. But I feel like it's important for context.

I got into web development later than my peers, I was in my mid 20's when I took a Home Learning College course on HTML and Flash. That was when Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 was the text editor of choice. Just by me typing that out, I feel old and it feels like an age ago that I signed up for that course and received all my course books and Adobe software in the post. I had a crappy (good at the time) Windows computer at home running the even crappier (always crappy) Windows Vista.

Back then It was just me and my wife at home, no kids and few distractions. So I was able to set aside a good chunk of time to go through the coursework and complete the challenges. And by "complete the challenges" I mean, fumble my way through the big ring-bound course books and copy the code from there onto my computer.

When I was in school, any kind of web development lessons just wasn't a thing. We had IT classes, but the coolest thing about that was the swivel chairs. I can clearly remember my first IT lesson in school, the teacher gathered us all round to look at one computer screen, and he said "So when you're typing and the cursor gets near the end of the screen, you can just.. [short pause while he tapped some keys] ..keep typing, and the cursor will automatically go onto the next line." Yes, that was about the extend of our IT lessons, that and messing about in Microsoft Paint.

I was lucky enough to have a computer at home. An Olivetti... something. A chunky cream coloured monitor the size of a large microwave, that sat on top of an even chunkier, even creamier breeze block of a computer with a floppy disk slot. I used that to practice typing the alphabet. It was OK for typing out documents with zero styling and then printing it out. You couldn't do anything else with it, except maybe hurl it at burglars with the intent of doing some serious physical harm.

A bit later, Dad would bring home his Mac he used for work. Don't get excited we're still talking about the early 90's, so it wasn't great, but better than anything we had before. That had Quark Express and Adobe Illustrator, which I actually got pretty good at. I would draw out side-on views of Formula One cars in vector point images, and learn how to use layers and gradients and stuff. That was a lot of fun. Plus it had a cool flying game on it, where you could just fly around islands and things.

Fast forward about 20 years, in 2014 I got my first junior developer position for a digital agency. I’d done a couple of small sites before then but was all very basic. At the agency, I remember I was once told to put a domain in my host file so that I could see the site in my browser. I didn't know what a host file was so of course I said "yeah no problem", and quickly had to look it up to see what it was and how to access it. Think I got away with that one. But I was eager to learn and tried to just soak up as much as I could, without looking like a total idiot.

In a previous job I’d been using Windows (7 I think) and was quite familiar with that, but when I started with the agency I soon realised that a Mac was a better option. I can remember attempting to use Putty or Play D’oh or some such terminal programme and found it tricky to understand. Meanwhile, my colleague (and now friend) was having a much better time on his MacBook Pro with his smug face perfect parting.

I wanted a Mac for home anyway so I used all my savings and bought myself a 16” MBP which I was then able to use for side projects and at work. I tastefully suggested that they could shove the Windows machine up their arse and that I really enjoyed working there.

While there I worked on custom Wordpress themes and plugins, attempting to understand the hooks and filters (I still only partially get them), and started working on Laravel applications. Also did a lot of stuff in the front end and loads of jQuery and vanilla JavaScript, also learned about Bootstrap layouts, gulp, grunt, guzzle, handlebars, less, sass, bower, npm, composer, the list goes on. And on.

And on.

Later down the line, I did a little bit with Angular, before really moving into VueJS, and fully immersing myself in Laravel. Which I am still using today. But that comes with its own learning challenges. Thankfully Laracasts is amazing as a developer learning resource, which I’ve basically competed.

More recently I moved into a leadership position with another company and these days it’s likely you’ll find me planning an agile sprint, preparing for a Retrospective or other company meetings. Sometimes I'll be searching for gifs that are loosely related to the latest marmite-and-cheese-hating comments on the companies #general slack chat.

Mentoring is also now a large part of my job role and it's really satisfying to watch a new a generation of junior developers grow in confidence and ability. Each new task is an opportunity to learn something new and that never really stops.

For any junior devs out there now possibly reading this article, let me tell you this, developing is hard. It's not easy, at all. There is so much to learn and remember. Google is your friend. Bash aliases are a lifeline. Live Snippets in PHPStorm are a godsend. Any shortcuts you can find to speed up your development will drastically improve your productivity. But it's a long hard slog. You cannot learn to code effectively in a weekend, it takes years to learn your craft. You'll go through highs and lows, you'll get imposter syndrome, you'll lack confidence, you'll start to question your own existence, and you will at some point say, out loud, "why the fuck doesn't this fucking thing fucking work!".

Other common phrases include “How did this ever work in the first place?”, “Why does this look different on [insert name of browser]?” and the old classic, “Well, it works on my machine”.

But, it is extremely rewarding, and when things do eventually start to work there is so much pride in your work, you'll start to look round the room to see who you can show this awesome piece of code to, this amazing, smart and clearly ground-breaking piece of functionality to, until you realise you're working from home, and theres no-one there except the cat. Who doesn’t care. He’s too busy licking his balls or pulling up the carpet.

I still enjoy developing and regularly throw in the occasional bug that my team will have to fix later. I like to leave my mark and keep them on their toes.

Looking back at that first conversation I have with a Home Learning College rep who sold me that course and when I think about all the cool things I’ve built and learned over the years, it’s been a wonderful, albeit difficult, but thoroughly rewarding journey.

Now if you don’t mind, it’s time for my nap.