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Discussion on: How did you get into programming in the first place?

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Jeffrey

I originally went to school for Interactive Media Design, and after about a year of various freelance projects (from sales and marketing collateral to retail store signage), I had quite a diverse portfolio but no way of displaying my work online. Sites like Dribbble, Behance, Squarespace, and other "WYSIWYG"-esque sites didn't exist at that time.

The only viable solutions were to a) make best friends with a web developer (scarce at the time in Atlanta) or b) grab yourself some books on HTML/JavaScript, CSS, PHP/MySQL and then fumble through building a WordPress site yourself. That was the route I opted for.

In the process of translating my design from Photoshop into the Browser, I fell in love with the immediacy of designing stuff for the web. At that time, jQuery was gaining traction and made manipulating the DOM easier to grok, and I took to CSS immediately. The rest is pretty much history: I gave up the land of Adobe products for client-side web development, and have working on freelance, contract, and consulting projects since 2006.