It was a sign-in/out program for people and vehicles at a consulting firm. Later, I added onto it an expense reporting page modeled after the spreadsheet they were using. It was written on the LAMP stack back in the late 90s, early 00s.
I was actually working as IT support -- not hired as a dev. But when all the workstations were in good shape, I had a bit of free time in that job. I had taken programming classes in high school (BASIC and Pascal). And no one could locate the source code for the old VB desktop app that did the same job. So they had me rewrite it as web-based.
They not only used that software internally, but they also sold it to other companies. It might still be running somewhere. Even though I wasn't hired as a dev, this software went to production and helped manage some business activities. So I count this as my first professional dev experience.
I was the only one working on it. I can't remember the exact timeline, but I imagine it took me a pretty long time. PHP was a recent phenomenon, so I taught it to myself as well as rudimentary HTML and CSS. I also used some very basic MySQL. I didn't even learn about indexes and foreign keys until several years later. :)
I remember the experience solidifying that I didn't want to do programming for a living. That I instead wanted to focus on sysadmin (now called Ops). But employers kept finding dev work for me to do once they caught wind. And through a previous employer, I kept picking up dev side projects for extra money. Until I eventually decided if I was going to keep doing it, I had to figure out how to make it not such a brain-frying experience. Today, 19 years later, (as part of a great team) I love it and I don't want to do anything else.
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It was a sign-in/out program for people and vehicles at a consulting firm. Later, I added onto it an expense reporting page modeled after the spreadsheet they were using. It was written on the LAMP stack back in the late 90s, early 00s.
I was actually working as IT support -- not hired as a dev. But when all the workstations were in good shape, I had a bit of free time in that job. I had taken programming classes in high school (BASIC and Pascal). And no one could locate the source code for the old VB desktop app that did the same job. So they had me rewrite it as web-based.
They not only used that software internally, but they also sold it to other companies. It might still be running somewhere. Even though I wasn't hired as a dev, this software went to production and helped manage some business activities. So I count this as my first professional dev experience.
Sadly, I've ran into this same issue a few times.. some even recently.
This is amazing. Were you the only one working on the rewrite? Did you use that experience to springboard you into other development jobs?
I was the only one working on it. I can't remember the exact timeline, but I imagine it took me a pretty long time. PHP was a recent phenomenon, so I taught it to myself as well as rudimentary HTML and CSS. I also used some very basic MySQL. I didn't even learn about indexes and foreign keys until several years later. :)
I remember the experience solidifying that I didn't want to do programming for a living. That I instead wanted to focus on sysadmin (now called Ops). But employers kept finding dev work for me to do once they caught wind. And through a previous employer, I kept picking up dev side projects for extra money. Until I eventually decided if I was going to keep doing it, I had to figure out how to make it not such a brain-frying experience. Today, 19 years later, (as part of a great team) I love it and I don't want to do anything else.