A Very Stressful Industry

It seems only yesterday that I was learning how to use an Apple IIe in my elementary school computer class. At this time, I remember my parents signed up with an AOL account and we had a dial up modem… the gateway to the internet then. My family always had the latest gadgets and in matter of fact, I probably was one of the very few middle school students that had their own green screen mobile cell phone. All these gadgets and gizmos intrigued me however I’ve always had this crazy fascination with computers, something with the way you can input commands via the keyboard and the computer being able to output something back. The thing about technology that has fascinated me the most is the internet. It’s amazing what a website application can do and how easy it is to make it public to the world wide web. This inspired me so much that I eventually started to learn how to write HTML when I was 13 years old. My dad also won a summer HTML class at the local computer store that had helped me start off to become the self made genius I am today. But wait, I sit here pondering and realizing that I’ve entered one of the most stressful industries… Programming.

The 8 P’s of Programming: Perfect planning and prior preparation prevents piss-poor performance. This pretty much wraps up the guidelines to creating elegant and usable applications. Forget the basic HTML design and the dynamic javascript events, I needed something more. That’s when I entered PHP at version 3 and relentlessly battled my way through learning this server side scripting language on my own. I remember reading simple tutorials online that had me on my way to programming PHP and using MySql as my RDBMS. Since then, I’ve continued using these technologies as my weapon of choice when it comes to my client’s and personal ventures.

Since then, I am now proficient in the following technologies:

• PHP
• MySql
• jQuery
• XHTML
• CSS
• Javascript
• JSON
• XML

I have all these technologies in my noggin because it became my life and almost made me a single man many times. My senior year of high school is when I became a hermit and stayed home to feed my addiction to programming for the web. Looking back, it did take a lot of time away from hanging out with friends in fact they use to tease and make fun of me for always being on my computer. Not for nothing, it all paid off. If I were to do this all over again with knowing how much work it is, I would refuse. I wouldn’t be able to do it all over again. It’s just too complicated…

My first profitable website was www.msmods.com. This dates back to 2003 – 2004, the MySpace boom… When Tom and his buddy from MySpace decided to spam the living crap out of millions of email accounts that had made MySpace what it is today. Anyways, I was probably the 5th “MySpace Resource” site that existed then. I remember a few sites that had inspired me to create this overly ambitious venture that is now “under construction” once again going through another major update. This is a great example to my belief in “practice makes perfect”… I have a problem with perfection, I’m stubborn, ambitious… These are all the qualities that make a good programmer.

Continuing education is one of the most important aspects for a programmer to keep themselves in the know how. There are so many technologies and many integration points that learning a magnitude of technologies is a better solution than knowing only a few. That is why I spend day and night learning other technologies. Many readers will probably think that I’m a bit obsessive and will feel a bit tinkered with my opinions. The fact is, technology has become ridiculously crazy that in order to fully succeed in web application development you must know a few technologies in order to create dynamic websites from ground up.

I enjoy the creativity and daily challenges of development. Programming is my hobby, my career, and even my worse enemy. It’s a very stressful job but someone’s gotta do it. Much luck to my readers that are pursuing this stressful industry. Become a hermit, always be eager to learn, and you will succeed!