My Journey to Web Development

For me, web development has always been an exciting and challenging occupation, a career where you spend the majority of your working hours in an intense concentration. An occupation you must love, or you just won’t succeed. You have to be willing to sacrifice the time needed to learn coding to a point where you have the skills to make a good living from it. Every day you need to push the limits of your abilities, as you are constantly scrambling to keep up with technology. Your ultimate goal is to perfect the craft of coding, whilst providing professional solutions for your clients.

My roots of development started early in the UK. I had my first computer when I was just 7 years of age. A BBC Micro Computer with only 32 kilobytes of memory, that my brother and I were gifted for Christmas. It was basic, in every way, but boy did I love it. I was smitten, not just for the gaming experience, but for programming, it was revolutionary for its day. We had to connect it to an archaic tape drive just to load a game, that would make weird noises for what seemed like an eternity while loading. Eventually, we got a 5.25-inch floppy drive, which loaded much faster and quieter. My Dad would buy us the MicroUser magazine that had coding samples, even complete games, that spanned multiple pages, that we would spend hours typing into the computer. We never got any to work, as one typo would crash the program. Things have changed a lot since those days, but my passion, drive, and enthusiasm for computing, programming, and tech came from those days back in the early ’80s.

I would spend hours in front of that computer, typing basic programs that would move blocks of pixels across the screen when you press the cursor keys. I would show off my skills in primary school classes. Yeah, I was a nerd, even back then. I would program VDU’s, 8x8 pixel blocks, and work out the calculations for each 8x1 row, based on its 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128 structure. I remember creating a whole picture of a fisherman, which I had sketched out on graph paper. I calculated the totals for hundreds of rows/blocks. Wow, told you I was a nerd.

I tinkered for many of my early years. I had another computer, an Atari ST/E, but this was used primarily for gaming. I had consoles and portable devices. From the Nintendo GameBoy, the Sega GameGear, the Super Nintendo, and Sega Mega Drive. I mostly gamed in those years. Had the opportunity to use the Acorn Archimedes, and the Macintosh 128k in middle and high school, but not really for programming, more for spreadsheets and word processing. I gamed on the ZX Spectrum Rubber Key, the ZX81, the Dragon 64, and the VIC20 with school friends.

My first PC didn’t arrive until 1992 when I first got into the job market. I remember it was an AST 486/DX66 with an 80Mb HDD and 8Mb of RAM. It ran Windows 3.1, and it was amazing to me. I mostly used it for productivity, as the internet was not mainstream at that time. I learned how to use Windows and Microsoft Office 8.0 which was installed via 21 floppy disks.

I learned how to upgrade computer hardware, adding a CD-ROM, sound card, modem, and eventually even replacing the motherboard, RAM, and CPU. Again, this was to amplify my gaming experience. It was a simple endeavor in those days compared to PC builds today.

I did not start programming professionally until 1998 when I had to make a web page for my work department and create global temperature maps using Fortran. Web page HTML was alluring to me due to its tag-based structure. I learned how to do it through experimentation with Microsoft Frontpage WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and Using Netscape and IE 4 browsers. By now the Internet was starting to take off. I took an interest outside of work and learned how to code in a very basic capacity, touching on CSS too. I built a movie review site that my good friend and I wrote reviews for, after taking trips to the cinema, I learned a lot, and my interest grew.

It was around this time I was courting my Mexican wife to be, via the internet, who I had met in a UK Microsoft chat room in ’97. Primarily we were using the ICQ chat app for Windows. Every day we would connect online. The connection was only 56 kilobytes per second, so video chat was not realistically possible, even though we tried Microsoft NetMeeting, but it was just too darn slow to be useful or functional.

In 2000, my now wife and I moved to Mexico City from the UK, we were pregnant with our first child. I managed to land a job as an IT Specialist where my father-in-law worked. One of many roles at the company was as a photographer, whereby I would travel throughout the country with the team documenting our telecommunication projects and whilst attempting to learn Spanish. During these projects, I was learning Classic ASP after reading about it in my .Net Magazine, and my boss purchased my first book on the subject. I was experimenting with VBScript, Javascript, and SQL in Microsoft Access. This helped, as I created a web page on Pocket PC to perform trigonometry calculations in the field using javascript.

After creating our own business in 2002, we needed a way to create invoices, and this is where iNetDM was born. iNetDM, written in Spanish, was my first full-fledged web application, that I spent years tweaking and refining. It was used for creating invoices and also a platform on which I could learn and develop new features and skills. Eventually, the application featured invoice, quotation and receipt management, messaging, stock control, and many other useful modules. This application was copyrighted in the Library of Congress in Washington, and to this day, it still exists and functions.

In 2007 our family moved to Acapulco and despite my fears, I decided to bite the bullet and try my hand at freelance web development. This was based on the years of work I had done with iNetDM and other little app projects here and there. I landed work in Adelaide, and then in Connecticut, Nevada, New Jersey, Colorado, and Sydney. I had the opportunity to visit San Fransisco, Las Vegas, Miami, New York, Pueblo Colorado, to name a few. I have been very fortunate on my development journey.

We moved to Pueblo, Colorado in 2016, for a year and 8 months, after the company I was working for sponsored me to work in the US. I worked as a senior web developer with an amazingly talented team of individuals, and I was sad to leave when our stay was cut short. In all, I worked with this company for 7 great years, both onsite and remotely, and I am truly grateful for the whole experience and great friendships I made. After leaving the US in 2018, we moved to Cancun, Mexico, where we now reside. (I know, poor me!)

To this day, I am still learning and adding to my developmental portfolio and skill set. Even though Classic ASP is now considered old, I can still shape it to fit any solution. It works very nicely with mainstream javascript frameworks such as Vue.js which is what I am in the process of learning today.

I still love my work, even after all these years, and I still finish every day with a great feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. I recommend coding if you have a passion for problem-solving, you enjoy learning, and you embrace design and creativity.

Many thanks to:

• Tony Macpherson, for triggering my imagination at his home in the early ’80s when he introduced me to “the computer”. Also for being my design teacher at school too, always an inspiration and always encouraging.
• My Mum and Dad, for buying Mark and I, our first computer at great expense, and allowing me to spend hours in front of it, sparking my passion.
• All my freelance clients, for trusting an up-and-coming web developer and hiring me, you all have shaped and inspired my career. You know who you are.
• My wife Mony, for your continuous encouragement every single step of my career. I would not be where I am today without your loving support.
• My family, who have always loved and stood by me through thick and thin, encouraging me to succeed.