Before I met my first computer I happily did artwork, it was one of my loves. Painting, drawing, sculpting, Nothing I ever planned to turn into a job. I enjoyed my hobby too much to turn it into a carrier, do what you love as a job and soon you don't love it quite so much... or so I thought at the time.
At an rate, sometime in 1981 (yes, I'm a certified old fart) I fell into computers. What happened was that I won a computer, This thing was Timex Sinclare and in was packed with RAM; It had a monstrous 8 Kilobytes of the stuff. Simply huge for the time. But what I fell into became my second love, Well, make that my third love, I cant' forget the reason I get up in the morning...
Anyway, I quickly moved from programming in BASIC to Fortran to Cobal an taught myself Assembly Language. I took a look a C and decided that Assembly looked easier. I moved from the Timex to a TI99/4A through several others. Now I use a Lenovo Laptop with XP Pro and if M$ doesn't get their act together I'll soon be moving to a Mac.
Anyway, back then when I first discovered computers, I was happy, I had another hobby to keep me busy, and then came along the web... The perfect medium were I could incorporate two of my greatest loves, Computers and Art. I continued to increase my knowledge of web development as the web developed.
Then came 2003... My employer of more than 16 years closed the doors, laid us all off. This was actually fine by me because I really hated my job and my employer. The best part is that, do to the fact that I lost my job to foreign competition cause by NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), the government sent me back to school. I made the decision then that I would never work for an employer that I did not like or do a job I hated ever again. The aggravation was shortening my life, so I went back to school to get a degree in web development...
I can tell you in one word what I actually learned in my time back at school "NOTHING!", but hey, the government paid for it and they sent me a weekly check to boot. The problem was that I had gained more knowledge from experience than they can teach in four years at even your best college. You might think that this was for nothing, but in reality, it was not. That piece of paper that I got by being bored out of my mind for several years helped to open doors that I could not have opened without it.
So now, contrary to my thought when younger (that is was not a good idea to do what you loved for a living), I now do what I love to do; sitting in front of that glowing screen at all hours of the day and night creating all manner of applications for the web. The best jobs are the ones that I do from start to finish; first creating the design for the site, then building the framework and finally coding it. It's like giving birth to a child and then watching it grow. Love what you do, do what you love and do it well... all the rest is gravy.
For web development I work in (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript (including Ajax), PHP and MySQL. Sometimes they get annoyed with me at work because I simply refuse to expand my knowledge of other languages, such as ASP, Cold Fusion or .NET. I know enough about them to get by in a pinch and I keep asking them why they would want to create something in anything but PHP. I guess there will always be those that think they need to pay for something when the best thing available is free, or maybe it is because they have been brainwashed them into worshiping a certain company (I'd name names, but if you don't know who I'm talking about then you've been programming under a rock. Please don't email me to argue how great they are or to debate the advantages of one language over another.)
In addition to working full time I also run my own small web development company.
If for any reason you do need to contact me try hube02 at earthlink dot net
