A Promising Start

My four year anniversary just came up at my current job a few months ago, and just now I'm starting to reflect on what that means. When I started, I was just a wet-behind-the-ears fledgling web developer, having taught myself html, some javascript, and some ColdFusion over the three years prior. I'd just graduated with a fine arts degree and a ton of debt - cuz hey, fine art is freaking expensive. Try building your own darkroom and producing two dozen photographs at 40" x 60" and see if your credit cards aren't a little closer to maxing out.

Anyway, so here I am on the other side of 48 solid months of a career devoted to one institution's website. I can't count the number of template changes, code-base changes, or "better ways of doing it" that we went through - most of which were someone else's decision. Not that I wasn't stirring things up on my end...

Working at a university is a strange existence. Especially when said university is years behind the times and hopelessly disorganized when it comes to technology and figuring out what the internet means. From what I can tell though, we're just like every other higher ed place out there. Sad, isn't it?

So I found myself in a department that knew it needed to adapt somehow for the web. No, let me change that - it knew that the website needed to be updated. Those are two entirely different conclusions and it's taken me years to figure out that the people I work for aren't in the first camp like I thought they were.

Geez, here I am running off on the tangent that most of my "deep" work conversations dwell on these days. Okay, so let's try this again... Four years plus at this job, and lots of growth from all the crazy politics, technology notions, and just plain figuring out how things could be done better. I've left html tables, 'b' and 'i' tags behind, and embraced CSS. XHTML is all I breathe these days. I spent years consuming ColdFusion and delving into the O'Reilly books trying to glean the secrets that Allaire/Macromedia hadn't told me yet I could do with this server-side technology. I'd stumble onto something new and feel exhilarated and anxious to implement it into what I was doing and had done before.

Over the last year, those moments didn't happen as often, and more often than not I felt a little constrained. Not all was ColdFusion's fault, I will readily admit. I don't work for the Information Technology group, so many doors remain closed for me. I collaborate with them when I can, but I still don't have the kind of access that I'd like. I had to build tools with ColdFusion to give myself a visual browser for the SQL server, a way to upload files to the live server, etc. But enough lay with ColdFusion that I was ready for a change.

I knew about PHP and all the others like ASP, .Net, JSP, WebObjects... I set out to find the best of all of them, and like many before me, landed at PHP. And this is the promising start that I alluded to. I feel that exhilaration again just leafing through the PHP 5 book I bought. On a sidenote, I think I have most of the books that O'Reilly has published. This time I did buy an O'Reilly - PHP Cookbook - because I love books that get into the meat of it without spending chapters waxing not so eloquently about this and that. I learn by doing, not reading (usually). I also grabbed the Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL by Gilmore, because I knew I needed to comprehend this new language if I was going to survive the transition. It's definitely been worth it. Now I just need to find a server that runs PHP 5. That's another blog waiting to happen - annoying web hosting companies.

Armed with PHP, the DOM model, CSS, and the X's (XML, XHTML), I feel more invigorated than ever. Maybe I should temper that enthusiasm before I ramble for another 300 words... Quick, switch to the PC and open Explorer! Okay, I'm back on earth again.