20 years of programming

It hit me just now that I've been programming for fun since 2004-2005, aka 20 years... So I thought I'd ramble a bit about some of those years, in brief. This isn't going to be an autobiography or anything, and isn't complete or well-edited, but just a bit of history for my own future reference I guess. Maybe I'll want to write something up that's more serious in the future.

According to an old updates file, I launched my first public site on November 3rd, 2004. That was just HTML though. On the 16th, an online friend took pity on me using a free site host that injected ads and other pop-up spam onto my page, and offered to let me host on his server as a subdomain. So I figured out how to use FTP and was hosted there. Then much later that same friend took pity on me again, I think after he realized how much copy-pasting I was doing in HTML, and showed me a basic PHP script (that by using his host would work automatically) that let me require_once some include files for all pages, or conditionally on some pages, and basically cut down my HTML burden significantly. My records say that August 20th, 2005 was when I replaced the old HTML file for my updates, with September 2nd, 2005 saying "The recoding is complete!" I assume that means the PHP recoding.

I'm not sure if I got it for my birthday that October, or if I got it earlier on, but I remember my mom taking me to Borders and I picked up a recommended book from my friend, PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites, 2nd Edition, by Larry Ullman. (Published June 21st, 2005.) In any case, PHP is actually a programming language, unlike HTML, so you could say I started programming for real sometime in 2005. It's now 20 years later...

See Full Post and Comments