Or, at least the five random people who managed to find my site!  I welcome you to my little nook on the internet.  I really have no idea what my plans are for this site, so I figured I’d start of with something easy: the five W’s(and one H).

Who Am I?

Great question!  I often wonder the same thing.  First, I’m a daddy of two gorgeous girls and a hubby to the hottest and weirdest chick I’ve ever met.  Yes, the latter is a compliment.  That’s about as deep as I’ll go personally.  I value my privacy, so I do not have an online presence.  I don’t use social media at all, so it’s difficult to find anything about me.

Somewhat more relevant, I’m a web developer.  I’ve been working with websites since 2003.  I was in college for Chemistry at the time, and I started selling things¹Like, against the terms of service things. on eBay.  Along the way, I got pretty good at working with HTML.  The supplier of items I was selling took notice and asked if I could help with their e-commerce site.  The site was osCommerce, and it was my first experience with PHP and MySQL.  After some tinkering, I learned that the osCommerce forums had the answers to a few of my coding questions.  Other problems I solved with pure stubbornness.

I began to realize how much I loved working with code.  I ordered one book about PHP, but I only got about halfway through.  I learned a lot more by doing.  After seeing some posts in the osCommerce forums that offered to pay for assistance,²At the time, the “ads” for people offering or requesting assistance with osCommerce for a fee was verboten.  Mods quickly and aggressively removed them.  I sat on the forum pages, clicking refresh over and over, hoping to quickly grab contact information for those seeking paid help.  I believe osCommerce now allows these types of posts in the forums. I figured I would give it a shot.

Learning As I Go

I began contacting site owners who requested professional help and offering my services.  At first, I only charged $5/hour.  I understood that I was no expert, and that I was using these small gigs for more experience.   Also, this was supplemental income to my “real,” part-time job as a front desk clerk at a hotel.

In those days, I would often take on projects that I had no idea how to complete.  These projects pushed my knowledge and experience further, but they also taught me a few very important lessons³I’ll definitely cover these soon. that I still refer to today.

Over the years, I’ve become pretty good at what I do, and I’ve added a lot of other skills along the way.  I still do a good bit of work with osCommerce, and although the once popular, open source shopping cart faded in prominence long ago,⁴A post on osCommerce’s fall from the top is something I really want to do. it will always have a special place in my heart.

What do I do now?

Nowadays I contract and retainer work for variety of businesses.  Whether it’s front-end development, designing back-end structures, long-term maintenance, or consulting, I try to different things during the day.  I still love doing things I’ve never done before, and I make a point to learn something everyday.

Where are you located?

I work from home in the little town of Starke, Florida.  While there are some things⁵Like 10Mb/s-down DSL.  Believe it or not, the download speed is fine.  The 0.7 Mb/s upload speed blows.  Especially when I’m hosting a lot of stuff that needs to be accessible from the outside. you have to get used to when moving to such a rural area,  I’ve come to love it.  It’s quiet, spacious, and affordable.

When…

I admit, I can’t really come up with anything for this “W”, but I suppose this counts for something.

Why start a blog?

There are several reasons.  Primarily though, I want to share my adventures in web development, systems, processes, etc.  I’ve certainly benefited from Stack Overflow like any other programmer, but I’ve also done some CTRL-C/CTRL-V from unknown, personal sites⁶Seriously.  Who hasn’t been desperate enough to resolve an issue that you’re beyond page 20 of Google’s results, all linking to “dark-web”-levels of obscure sites, looking for answers. of other people who encountered similar roadblocks.  Instead of being all take, I want to give back by documenting some of the more interesting scenarios I’ve run in to.

How’s this going to work?

I have no clue.  I do know that many people start blogs with the best of intentions, but they fail to consistently update them with new content.  At this point, I can see why.  It’s taken several hours to come up with the content for this initial post.  Granted, the scope of this introduction is wide open.  Hopefully, more focused content will come easier.

As this is my first post on my first blog, I’m not really sure what else will end up on here.  I’d like to do some short how-tos, industry commentary, and other things.  Knowing the difficulty of the commitment going forward, my initial intentions are to update the site at least once per month and to keep each post as short as possible.

If you manage to wind up here in the future and find something interesting or would like to make a suggestion, please let me know by commenting.

About David

Web Developer