Looking Back At My Web Development Timeline
Dreamweaver is NOT the most awesome thing in the world
Note: This post is more for me than you. I want to document what I’ve done, where I’ve been, and where I am going. Maybe in a year I’ll look back and say, “Damn, I was an idiot back then,” just like I do now.
I’m curious on how many of my readers use Dreamweaver. Do you solely use DW or do you use other editors/IDE’s? When I started out in the web development and design world, DW was considered the best. That was back at version 3 I believe. I still have a Dreamweaver 4 Magic book lying around here somewhere. This is back at the tale end of table use, too. Man did I seriously hate tables. But anyway, DW’s design view was how I worked. I trusted it to show me things were working correctly. Remember, I started out in print design, and everything I know I self taught, and the “community” was not what it is today. All I knew was that people made web sites using Dreamweaver.
My first job doing web development and design was working for a small company, and I was the only guy there to do anything internet related. Anything I didn’t know, I had to find out quickly. Once CSS really started to take off, I soon realized that DW was definitely not as honest as I thought it was. That was about the time that my love affair with DW ended. Design view became worthless.
What is the point of all that you ask? It took me a long time to realize that there was more out there than Dreamweaver. I still use it for simple stuff, and I do like its CSS editing and the ease of FTP (thought I am switching to FileZilla now), but I use NetBeans for my IDE now. Love it.
The Sleeper Has Awakened!
Name the movie for that quote, and win a star! Fast forward two and a half years from that, and I start a new job. At an awesome company, where I have a very good manager. Why? Because besides just being a good manager like type, he also has a wealth of knowledge of things I didn’t know. Within a few weeks, I REALLY found the internet. He pointed me to some popular blogs like css-tricks.com, smashingmagazine.com, net.tutsplus.com and a ton of others. Suddenly I find out that there actually is a community. One that is alive with information from interesting and very knowledgeable people.
I had been reading books, and I mean a lot of books, but the design community really started opening my eyes. I had a lot of catching up to do, because it became apparent that this thing had been around for a while, and I was new. How did I catch up? A lot of late nights, which I still do. I read constantly. Of course then the guy has the nerve to show me netvibes.com, and now I have rss feeds coming out of my ears.
CSS Seduced Me
When I started working at this new position (which I still do!), I didn’t think I was any good. After a while though, it became apparent that in one area I actually excelled at, and that was CSS. I was late to the game with that by about a year, but once I got the hang of it, I read everything I could find (which has never stopped). Here is the tutorial that got it all started, if you are interested at all.
Of course I knew enough at that point to fix most browser issues, but my job has taught me more than I would have imagined. I believe it is because I work in such a fast paced turn around environment.
Words get pressed
About 2 years ago, which would be 1/2 a year into this job, my manager tells me I’m going to be building a blog using WordPress. I had never heard of it. What could it be? So he showed me the ropes in about an hour, and I slowly patched together a blog out of WordPress. It was like a god came down and said “Let there be awesome,” and there was. I then built a freelance site using it, and it came out great. The client can now make changes to all his pages himself, I don’t get bugged, and I got hooked. Of course after that, I started thinking about doing my own blog.
I caught the jQuery bug 1 year ago
I was now finding it hard to sleep because of all the things I had learned and couldn’t stop thinking about it. Then during one of my reviews, my manager says “We need someone to know javascript.” There is more to that, but we won’t open that can of worms. So I dove into it. I bought a book, and started reading. What is this thing called jQuery? This book I bought, full of strange syntax kept mentioning it. That was about when the shiz hit the fan. If I was code, I would marry jQuery. She has to be about the hottest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve loved taming her.
Present Day
Lately I have felt that I have jumped up a notch in my learning. I have 3 things I’m trying to accomplish at once, on top of what I already have going. Magento popped up, PHP is now in the running, and Drupal is on my radar. All three of which I want to know by the end of the year. At least enough to do something with them, and then perfect them as I go on from there. I would have thought that by now I would be burned out on what I do, like I did with designing in print. If anything, I find that I want to learn more and more, and there isn’t enough time in the day to do it all. I am excited to see what I’ll figure out next.
Coupon Code: webmachine
Tags: Web Development
