How I became a Web developer
So how'd I end up in a land-locked city you ask? Sadly, it all comes down to money. I guess that kind of makes me a sell-out, huh? heh. When I got out of the Air Force, I had it all planned out to live in Miami for a while to be near some of my good friends. I had the Air Force ship all of my stuff (okay a few boxes) to Miami and I was on my way. When I arrived in Miami, all of my friends told me I had to get an apartment on South Beach, so I did. I got the best place I could hardly afford - a 10x10 foot room, but I was on South Beach! I then began my search for a job in the shipping industry. That's what I did in the Air Force, so I figured it'd be a breeze to get a shipping job in the city that's the "gateway to Latin America." Of course, I didn't take into consideration that I only speak one language fluently (okay, almost one). In order to get a decent job there, I needed to speak at least two languages, and preferably three or more. Unless I knew somebody, which I didn't. I've gotta tell you, it was a little discouraging. Thankfully, I was on terminal leave from the Air Force for a couple of months, so I still had a little income.
So my buddy Scott, who I met in the Air Force, got out about a year before me and was working at a company building Web sites. He was doing Quality Assurance for them and was moving into a development role. He mentioned that his position would be opening up and they were looking for people. I had some QA experience, but it wasn't in software. Somehow he convinced them into talking to me. I had some very basic UNIX skills - enough to telnet into the base computer (ah, the days of senseless acess) while stationed in S. Korea to access email and transfer files, but other than that I was pretty green on the computer front. Thankfully, this was in the very early stages of the Web development boom, so there weren't many other people out there with much experience either. Anyway, I figured it was worth a trip to Atlanta, if for no other reason, to see Scott.
I showed up for the interview, and everybody was very nice, but unfortunately they wanted to hire somebody with some good experience because they were maturing into an organization that needed to start focusing on quality. The guy I was speaking with said that he'd like me to speak to his manager of engineering, Craig, before I left. He picked up the phone and called him in. He asked him to spend some time with me and see if there was anything in his organization I could do. It was very apparent that he was caught off guard and I was thinking that I couldn't wait to get out of there. But as it turns out, Craig was a really nice guy. He asked me a bunch of questions and I was brutally honest about my computer skills - I didn't want anybody to be under the impression that I could do something I couldn't. We got along pretty well, and after a while he invited a software engineer in to speak with me. I went through the drill again, and ultimately had a pretty good time as far as interviews go.
I left Atlanta thinking it was nice of them to spend some time with me and all, but certainly figured they were just being nice about it. A few days later, an offer letter showed up in Miami for a development position. To say that I was shocked would be an understatement! In retrospect, it's pretty clear to me that they were either A) very desperate for people and I seemed reasonably honest, or B) were intrigued at the prospect of seeing if they could take somebody with little computer experience and turn them into a developer. I can only guess if any money was exchanged on betting. Of course, the offer was inline with my experience, but it was enough to eek by and pay rent. It didn't matter to me because it was A job and it was definitely something I was interested in doing. I looked at it as the learning experience of a lifetime.
No love lost in leaving Miami! So I show up for work about as freaked out as you can imagine, not knowing anything and all. They paired me up with a guy named Lee, who was possibly the best person on the planet to get paired up with as a mentor. He started me out nice and slow - had me start working on a piece of a project he was working on. Every day he'd tell me to make my program do x and he'd run through very quickly some pointers in the right direction and then I'd be off trying to figure it out. I stayed late every day trying to get things to work as he expected, and every night I'd arrive at a solution. And every day, he'd say "great, it does exactly what I wanted it to. Now make it do this..." So the cycle repeated itself for quite a while, until one day I realized my simple little program was several thousand lines of code and did a fair amount of stuff. If he would have told me what he ultimately wanted, I think I probably would have thrown in the towel. So really it came down to having a great and patient mentor, Lee.
In those days we used Perl CGI for just about all jobs. It wasn't long before I was writing Perl programs (for adminstrative pages) that wrote Perl programs that would ultimately spit out the HTML and JavaScript needed. At any rate, I gained a lot of experience working on many different projects, and worked with a lot of really great people.