Oooooh could you share more about your path to software development? How did that start and progress?
An excellent question.
I got my very first computer when I was no more than 6-7 years old.
It was an Apple ][ with 32 kilobytes of system memory, a 1-3MHz Motorola 6502 CPU, and two 5.25″ floppy disk drives. And no software. This is what you saw after turning it on, if it still worked.
And that’s only if it worked. The first few I got had garbage errors, so I had to pore through the repair guide, swapping chips from one to the other until something worked.
Of course there was no software on this, no games, no internet, nothing. So I had to make another trip to the library and check out some books on programming, just so I could make myself some video games to play. It didn’t take long before I realized that making the games was as much fun as playing them, so I started delving more into that.
Fast forward a decade and a half, I’d been fucking around and developing my skills when a friend of mine suggested we start a consulting business focusing on minor local ad-hoc networking, i.e. LAN parties. He pointed me at PHP, and I coded a rudimentary website for the project.
After that, I started working out my own hobby projects here and there, building a few personal sites and the like, when I saw that one of the porn sites I quite enjoyed was hiring a coder. I figured in for a penis, in for a pound, and managed to get the position.
The code was an absolute mess. Written in (and probably on) PCP (I mean PHP) by a C++ expert, it used dirty tricks and worst practices like they were the next new thing. I was able to extend the code while the site grew from 50,000 users to 400,000 before running afoul of bangbros’ copyright enforcement vultures.
After that, another site was founded with many of the same users, this time using a codeigniter-based framework that I had developed over the prior three months in my spare time. That site grew steadily until dwindling ad revenue meant it could no longer pay server bills, and I again moved on to pastures with more green.
At this point of course I was a seasonèd developer, and a friend of mine suggested I apply for a job at [UNIVERSITY], where I’ve been since 2012.
