A Community of Diverse Backgrounds
Cross posted on PHPAppalachia.org.
To me, it’s always very interesting to hear the pre-PHP stories of other PHP programmers—the days before they programmed in PHP, what they did and how they came to call themselves PHP programmers. The stories vary greatly from programmer to programmer, and almost none begin with: “I was working toward a degree in computer science ….” In fact, the more people I talk with, the more I’m convinced that the typical PHP programmer, in fact, sort of got to where they are by an odd arrangement of life circumstances we call coincidences. Almost none elected to be where they are, but nearly all enjoy the work they do, many to a great degree of passion.
Joined by Elizabeth Naramore, Chris Spruck, Randall Bollig, and James Logsdon, we discussed how we all have diverse backgrounds ranging from marine biology to organizational behavior to literature to business to early employment from job offers while in high school. I’ll let the reader decide to whom each background belongs. I think other programming communities do not have such diversity of backgrounds; I could be wrong. Yet, it seems to me that other communities have developers who started with the intention of gaining a Computer Science degree for the purpose of being a programmer. This does not seem to be the case (to me) with much of the PHP community.
Such were the conversations held in my Honda Pilot as we ascended into the Great Smoky Mountains with the intent to reach the summit of Clingman’s Dome. As I pulled into the parking lot near the summit, visibility dropped to near zero as clouds enveloped us. I opened the door to a great blast of icy wind, and though we weren’t exactly dressed for the occassion—we saw a family wearing scarves and toboggans—we proceeded to hike up the half mile trail to the summit. We couldn’t make out much of the way in front of us, so as it began to sprinkle a freezing rain, we made the decision to turn back, not knowing how far from the top we were. We determined this was a good thing, for, even as we were soaked in the rain walking back to the car, it began to hail and sleet with great force once we reached my Pilot.
Rain-soaked and cold, we proceeded down the mountain, nevertheless upbeat and, I think, happy to have shared the adventure with fellow and diverse PHPers.
How did you come to be a PHP programmer?
7 Comments
Actually, I was working toward a degree in computer science. For some reason, getting out into the real world sounded more appealing, so I co-founded a web dev shop, and PHP quickly became my weapon of choice.
That's the beauty of PHP, the target audience isn't CS majors. Rasmus said something to the effect of "Who better to write a data filing program than a file clerk, PHP allows them to do that"
So true - I mean, I was an art major in college and tried to make it as a painter when I first got out of school. PHP sucked me back in though ;) Enjoyed it ever since.
Actually in my case, I am a classically trained Computer Scientist. But back at the 'right time' when the Web was JUST starting ... HTML was considered a 'programming language', and so only computer folks were using it.
So my first 'real' computer job was making HTML pages for the Computer Science department's homepages. Once I graduated and left school, I got a job, again, working on the web. This time doing lots of Perl CGI scripts, and Java Applets ...
Time went on and I stayed in the Web world, the languages used changing, and ending up with PHP.
Enjoyed meeting with you and the others at phpappalachia - sorry I didn't get a chance to throw in on this topic when it came up there, so I'll add it here.
Started with PHP in 1996 (PHP/FI!), and worked in a combination of PHP/Perl/ASP until the end of 1999. Since 1999 probably 90% of my work has been in PHP, with bits of Java, Coldfusion and Perl for good measure.
Initially got in to PHP at the encouragement of an ISP support tech who said it was 'better' than perl. I think it was 'better' because it gave line numbers for the errors instead of just 'CGI ERROR' on the screen, which cut down on their support calls!
I have Bachelor degree in Political science and law but I've been working as web developer for about 6 years now.
my story is little funny, I was so addict to the internet so in my journey I learned to run IRC servers, Eggdrop bots and write TCL scripts, later it become so boring to play with kiddies stuff and decided to learn something seriously and then I had nightmares to understand how to do stuff with Perl, it wasn't easy at all, and all I learned is to install perl scripts without even being able to customize or make changes to it.
so later I found PHP3, start reading the manual page after page; it was pretty easy to learn the basic of PHP or actually the basic of programming
I'm also a classical Computer Scientist with two degrees, in fact. However, at this point, I do very little programming and spend most of my time finding people far smarter to program on my behalf. I get to dream up projects and architect solutions with the team--the best of both worlds. I started playing with PHP in 2001, late to the game it sounds, but I have had few happier days than when I started reading about PHP5 and the features it was bringing to the table.