Probably time for an #introduction. I’m a complete newbie here and kind of like that. The web has always been at its most interesting to me at the times it has been like the Wild West. That is, new frontiers being discovered minute by minute. I started my web journey when I was a director of a so-called multimedia company in Glasgow in the 90s. I learned basic HTML from our 19-year old programmer Clarke Duncan. I started web design on my own when I moved to Donegal, Ireland in 1999. ⬇️
One of the web sites I worked on with Clarke was the launch of schuh.co.uk - now a successful global footwear retailer. When we did their first web site you couldn’t buy a shoe on it. You had to go into the shop. Another one to put in the Wayback Machine is online-irish-art.com, the site I launched after I moved to Ireland. This time, you could buy art from local artists through a payment gateway, which was cutting edge at the time. ⬇️
So I always did web sites, and design for print, to supplement my main income which was advertising photography. In 2014 I went back to college again to do a postgrad H. Dip. in Computing Science. This got me my first training job in 2015 and I have been with the same company ever since. I train Java, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, and a little bitty bit of Python. I really enjoy when developers’ first software course is one of mine. It’s a special privilege to inspire those new to the industry.⬇️
When developers are new to the industry managing expectations is just as big a part of my job as is explaining code syntax. I always say, from a colleague Greg Curtis whom I started at StayAhead by shadowing, you’ve got to be comfortable with NOT knowing stuff in this game! Anyone that says hashtag 100daysOfCode they learnt JavaScript this week hadn’t really got that. It’s all continuous learning, and that’s what attracted me to this group. We all can teach: we all can learn. ⬇️
The seamlessness of these two parallel processes of learning and sharing that learning is what drives so many developers. Repeat. You have to be comfortable with NOT knowing. So I’m hoping to both learn and share here. 😎