I started tinkering with HTML in 1996. It was simple and I liked that I could make web pages that looked better than 90% of what was available at the time. Back then "Webmaster" was the coveted title. I actually did move into a webmaster role for a while - HTML, a little CSS, and Photoshop - for the company I worked for at the time. It was actually a pretty sweet gig.

After a while, I let it go to take a supervisor position in a different department.

The guy who took over for me was asked to do more with the site and was handed a book on PHP & MySQL. Eventually, they decided they needed a team and I was able to move back to doing web stuff with the stipulation that I learn PHP. So I did!

It was the year 2000 and I bought a copy of PHP & MySQL for Dummies (because I knew nothing of programming languages at the time) and went through it page by page, eventually building a personal blog system (that ran for quite a few years). I was a web developer! I held that position for 13 years, during which I learned jQuery (because JavaScript was weird and required), which landed me the job I have now as a front-end developer.

That unnecessarily long intro brings me back to today... I'm relearning PHP. I was approached about an opening in another company doing PHP development a few months ago, so I started looking at it again.

I am really having fun relearning it (and learning a lot of other stuff along the way). Did I get the other job? No. No one wants a 6+ years rusty developer. Am I okay with that? Sure. Am I still playing with PHP in my spare time? Oh yeah!

I am building exactly what the world needs - another social networking site. I am building it with the mini framework I built as part of Brad Traversy's Udemy course (TraversyMVC) and Vanilla JavaScript.

It's so nice to have a project I'm excited about working on.

I've read a lot of terrible things about PHP, although most of them are quite subjective. I don't know why someone should avoid PHP... There are still jobs out there and it still powers A LOT of the web. I've studied Java and worked a bit with C#, but I have to say I prefer PHP to them both.

I'm not writing this as an invitation to have you convince me to learn Python or {insert-hot-new-programming-language-here}. I do still plan on spending some quality time digging into Node/Express/MongoDB... Just not this month.

No one knows what the future will hold, so I am entertaining myself during this time of social distancing with a not-as-trendy programming language, getting back to my roots, so to speak. Again, I'm having fun, and there's nothing wrong with learning something marketable that no one else wants to learn anymore. 😎