Published: 09/22/2015

I’ve been developing for the web for over 10 years. I started writing for the web when I was 13. At 17 I got enough freelance work to pay for my first year of college (and buying a nice Macbook). It took me 6 and a half years of going to school while working full time to graduate. In all of that time I have learned a lot about the internet and about working with people.

I’ve cut my teeth on IE 6, IE 7, IE 8, IE 9 and IE 10. I’ve seen Gmail in beta (I had submitted my old old Yahoo email address to be one of the first 10,000 to get an invite to gmail) and most versions of Firefox.

I’ve written production systems, with real customers, in PHP, Coldfusion, Ruby, Javascript, Java and C#. I’ve been writing code since I was 13, I got started because of the internet and the amazing things that you could do with some CSS and some HTML. I spent an entire summer locked in my room writing CSS learning about positioning, the box model, styles, margins vs position absolute or relative and much more beyond that.

A few things I’ve learned in my career:

Read the Agile Programmer and apply that to your life. Work on your soft skills, those are the MOST important skills you will ever have as a programmer!

Great books to read:

  1. Practices of an Agile Developer (ISBN: 978-0974514086)
  2. The Passionate Programmer (ISBN: 978-1934356340)
  3. The Pragmatic Programmer (ISBN: 078-5342616224)
  4. Soft Skills: The software developer’s life manual (ISBN: 978-1617292392)