Eight years of PHP

on April 04, 2013. in Blablabla. A 3 minute read.

This time around eight years ago I was introduced to this thing called PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. I studied it in college as a part of classes on “Internet Technologies”. It consisted of HTML, CSS, some Javascript and XML, and PHP.

Maybe a half a year earlier my parents finally gave in and agreed to hook up to the Internet via our local ISP. At that time I was mostly hanging out on IRC channels, bulletin boards and the like. Soon enough I got curious about how all that stuff works and me being a fresher picked a class that sounded cool, the aforementioned “Internet Technologies”.

First I wanted to be a designer, but luckily for everyone I soon realised I am not quite talented for that sort of work. I still don’t understand what is so bad about having a green background with red fonts on it.

Then the PHP classes started. I was lucky enough to have a great professor teaching it and I quite enjoyed the lessons. I owe a great deal of gratitude to him and am lucky to call him a friend today. In the following years of college he pushed me to learn more than what was planned by the classes, took me to conferences and made me present my work there and so instilled in me the love for programming.

Thanks Zlatko!

One of the first things we did in class was printing out numbers from one to ten and have the even numbers coloured blue and the odd ones red. Or maybe it was the other way round. And that was fun! Some text that looks like you mashed your hands over the keyboard can do such a thing? It’s magic!

There’s another thing I remember. We had a “home project” that we were supposed to make. It was a simple address book, basic CRUD operations, nothing fancy. Well, nothing fancy today, but then… Oh man. I was stuck for at least a day trying to connect to the MySQL database and run a simple query against it. Once I did it though, I was jumping from joy like a little kid and ran three circles around the house. Magic!

Somehow at that point I was certain that doing this as “work” would be extremely fun and could clearly imagine myself doing it in my life. Hell, for the first time I knew what I want to do when I grow up.

And here I am eight years later, doing exactly what I wanted to do happy with how things turned out. Here’s to eighty more years.

Tags: about, php, life, random.