Introduction of the web developer: Steven Podlecki
I started programming when I was 14 years old. I started in qBasic which was fun. Simple yes/no programs with loops and such. After qBasic, I started to develop software in Visual Basic. VB was a great introduction to programming and allowed me to quickly learn the dynamics of programming. Developing software to make “life a bit easier” when doing repetitive tasks at work.
One of my favorite programs developed was a .CSV creator for eBay's “Turbo Lister.” It would create dynamic eBay Product Descriptions with different information on one template. It really helped out when you had to develop the design then input 50-100 products each with their own file… after doing the different designs, you would have to make a list of titles… not fun when the lists were a couple thousand items. Normally it would take about 2-4 full business days to complete this task. After the program was designed and working, this task turned into about 1-2 hours total. Not too shabby if you ask me.
While I was happy with VB, I wanted to touch base into PHP. Why PHP? It is open source, extremely dynamic, ever changing, and very powerful. My PHP career started out with just having some fun with different pre-made systems such as osCommerce.
I am a fully self-taught web developer. I started in PHP and XHTML (non-tabless)… after a couple years of getting comfortable with PHP, I learned CSS very quickly. The cross-browser tricks is probably the most fun I've had in the development side. CSS was very easy to learn in my opinion. As of late, I have been having fun with jQuery animations and AJAX. jQuery seems to be very powerful and very much supported cross-browser.
My Tools:
Dreamweaver MX, Flash MX, Adobe Suite CS3, Notepad, putty, Linux, Apache, mod_*, MySQL, oh… and google!
My Expert Knowledge:
PHP, CSS, CSS3, XHTML, Cross-Browser Compatibility, Server maintenance, Online Marketing Solutions, MySQL DB Design/Raw Queries, Windows (ya ya, I know… FAILGA!), jQuery, Free Search Engine Optimization
Stuff I have been google'n on:
jQuery, HTML 5, WordPress, PHP5 OOP