A Developers Journey

After 4 years of coding commercially, recently I had a look at the services Weirfire offer now and compared them with what we knew when the business first began. The services we now offer range from complex ecommerce content management systems to flashy AJAX tabs and again to SEO and internet marketing services.

 So how did it all happen?

Around 7 years ago I started a Computer Science degree at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland where I learned languages Java, C++, C, Prolog, Perl scripting, shell scripts, XML, UML, JSP among strategies for problems such as sorting lists and going back to Alan Turings notion of what is computable.

During my third year at university I had a distraction from Northern Ireland in the form of my now wife Grace but managed to get through the year and passed everything. Instead of going back to university for my 4th year I took a year out and went to live in Northern Ireland to work for a year.

The job market was very tight in Northern Ireland at the time I moved over and even with a degree there were no employers keen to take me on. The main problem was that I had no commercial experience in any of the languages which these companies were looking for candidates which had the necessary skills. I decided to work voluntary for 4 months in an IT support position in a training college for the disabled. It was this that then led me onto a 4 month contract with Securitas as a field engineer rolling out PC’s to Royal Mail staff within the entire country of Northern Ireland in a huge £40,000 mercedes transit van. The biggest thing I’d ever driven had been a Kia Shuma 

While starting the voluntary work I also decided at that point that I was going to have to make my own experience if I was going to get one of these jobs so I started teaching myself web tecnologies and the first tutorials I did were from www.w3schools.com where I learned HTML, CSS, MySQL, PHP, XHTML, Javascript, VBasic, ASP among other bits and bobs. I then moved onto www.php.net where I learned the bulk of my PHP knowledge.

When the field engineer contract ended I decided to start my own web design company and was only really looking to build web pages in HTML, CSS with a little bit of PHP for contact forms.

Joining www.digitalpoint.com/forums/ was probably the biggest factor in our services growing wings as this is the place where I drastically expanded my knowledge in PHP and learned in depth information on the search engines and how to market your websites. I think I remember asking “how do I get my website onto Google?” and proceeding to go to the Google page where you can submit a website to their index.

Towards the end of 2004 we got our first ecommerce client by which I built an entire ecommerce system custom made. This no longer exists as I moved over to oscommerce at a later date but this project was certainly a huge learning curve particularly with the HSBC ePayments CPI which has over 1000 posts in problems on the oscommerce forums.

Projects such as www.reggaetonline.net and www.hodgedup.com were other noticeable projects by which there were steep learning curves and in particular Reggaet Online we had our first real taste of project management with 4 other coders working for us for around 2 weeks to meet a deadline.

We can virtually offer any web service there is now including graphic design, web development and marketing.

I’ve written this post for those post graduates or people just out of school who are wondering how they are ever going to get into programming or web design. Go make your own experience.

 

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