Comments on: A Coder’s Journey

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 22:06:00 +0000

Gonna have to flat-out disagree with everyone disagreeing with me. Graphic designers who designs user interfaces, including web sites, don’t absolutely have to code. There are plenty of professional designing and not coding websites. Leave coding to developers. You can be a jack of all trades, but you’ll be a master of nothing. Even if xhtml/css are easy. If you can expertly code xhtml/css, I already brand you a developer. If you can program javascript, which is a HLL for all intents and purposes, you’re for sure not just a designer. At that point you’re a front-end developer who can also design. The end.

By: Athmane

Athmane — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 23:21:15 +0000

You got me inspired, Thank you Matt

By: hybrid756

hybrid756 — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 15:39:54 +0000

Interesting story! It’s always nice to know that not everyone has gone to uni to do Computer Science and appeared out the other end with a kickass web programming career ;)

Made my first page back in 1999, at uni attempting to do Physics. It was all HTML and looked like absolute crap.

3 more years of uni, left to work at the council, went to law school for 3 years. That was in 2004. Got a myspace account (groan), started messing about with the already enormously bloated code of tables within tables within tables to dabble in some CSS. Never really got the hang of that.

Got a job in a solicitors, paid bills, was completely miserable, quit law school, took up amateur photography (I still entertain the idea of becoming a full time music photographer), did a course in advanced photoshop, finally got the hang of layers, took a course in flash, hated it, took a longer, intensive course in graphic design, loved it. That was a year and a half ago, and it taught me NOTHING about coding. So I’ve been teaching myself that ever since.

And now I’m at the enlightenment phase where CSS finally makes sense. It feels like when I wake up in the morning, the sun is shining and the birds are singing. I’ve even started dreaming about coding. That’s not sad, right?

Started learning wordpress 2 days ago!

By: A Decade Past: Further Evidence of the Importance of Web Standards :: Echo Enduring Blog - A Web and Graphic Design Blog

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 02:44:58 +0000

[...] expected to take, but it’s been a fun ride. If you want to know more about it, check out “A Coder’s Journey,” which I wrote several months ago for [...]

By: Julianne of New Zealand

Julianne of New Zealand — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 10:18:59 +0000

What a fantastic story. In many ways it was a stroll down memory lane for me, as well as a history of computers and the internet since you first found them. I think one shouldn’t be embarrassed of the embracing of trends at the time, such as flash splash pages etc, because those were “cutting edge” in their day, that’s the history lesson aspect of your story, and it’s kind of cool to remember that. One thing that shines through the stories of you and all the commenters who shared theirs is the ability to learn and evolve, as well as making the best of what was available at the time which I personally think is a very cool thing. I can remember back in 1996 discovering how to make graphics with the paint programme in the accessories folder of my second computer, which was my first pc (before then I had the tiny apple classic). These graphics I put on my geocities site, back in the day. Thanks, Matt, and thanks to all the commenters too for the walk down memory lane.

By: Derrick Workman

Derrick Workman — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 05:25:01 +0000

Thanks man great story. I think most of us can relate in some way.

By: David Bohórquez

David Bohórquez — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 22:58:10 +0000

Great article. If I told my story it would share many things with yours: Learning from my dad; self-taught HTML; being a table-guy and feeling really ashamed for my past work when I discovered CSS; studying something not design-related…

But the best part is that this is a journey with so much to discover yet.

By: rbrill

rbrill — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 10:55:23 +0000

I started out on a Spectrum 128k+2 with Basic trying to create a simple drawing program with a mouse I had aquired especially for the Spectrum. I also tried building games but would always end up playing other games instead! I was 15 at the time and gradullay got bored until 10 years later I got into web programming, now I’ve been hooked ever since. With skills such as XHTML, CSS, jQuery, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, Actionscript 3 (highly enjoyable) and ASP.NET under my belt I feel I’m well on my way to having quite a large skill set, lets hope it continues…

By: Ryan Sadwick

Ryan Sadwick — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:22:52 +0000

Great post. It’s always good to add more tools to the toolbox… or as I would say, your “dev shed”.

Your story about dBase reminds me of when my father showed me qBasic when I was a kid. Endless hours of creating text-based games that were similar to those old “Choose Your Own Adventure” books.

By: Otto Rask

Otto Rask — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 06:27:20 +0000

I remember touching MS FrontPage as a little kid. I didn’t understand how to get my pages on the net back then and dropped it out of frustration.

Later on we had a small HTML course at junior high school. Our teacher taught us bad presentative tagsoup. But it got me on my journey. I surfed the net and learned what CSS is, what standards mean, how to manage server space, install things such as WordPress, FTP clients, yada yada.

Right now I’m trying to learn JavaScript and PHP to before going to school to learn media theory, technology and applications.

I’m also learning UnrealScript, which is the logical code behind Unreal Engine games. A bit like Java, but with special aspects engineered for game development. :)