I started my career in UNIX C development at Scientific Atlanta on their System Manager 10 computer that controlled cable TV systems. About that same time I stumbled upon HTML, Perl, lynx and Mosaic. My mind and keyboard came alive as I learned how these things fit and I started building web applications. My first one was an online version of our cumbersome test plans. I converted the MS/Word test plan documents to HTML with paging. Then, I built a simple Perl script and DB to dynamically keep up with the test results. That gave me just enough confidence and recklessness to go out and try more things I had never seen before.
… Pause for a few years of hardcore development and then moving more into architecture and then into management …
So, here I sit today thinking that I’m useless at this new world of fancy web applications, IDE’s, frameworks, and platforms that seem tough to get into the guts of. Sure, the principals are still the same and the architecture needs the same TLC, but what about the code?
Reconnecting with the Open Source community allowed me to find w world of new and more intuitive building blocks for us Old Timers to play with. I’m finding that PHP has come a long way and is well embedded into many of the new mid-tier web platforms like vBulletin, Joomla, WordPress and Drupal. With a little old school PHP, it’s possible to tweak existing themes and widgets and build something quite powerful. Take for instance the Fred Squared website. That was created in a matter of days.
The inner geek is still alive and able to learn some new tricks. Setting up cheap web hosting or enabling web sharing on a workstation is much easier than it used to be. There’s still a place for the experts to come along and make it bulletproof, but for a small to mid-tier product, these tools are hard to beat and it gives me an outlet to play with vi (the finest editor ever to grace the platters of a hard drive).
Tags: develop, drupal, geek, joomla, open source, unix, vi, web applications, wordpress
