Bit of a special day today – it’s “officially” 10 years since I started working professionally in IT (2 June 2000), so here’s a brief journey through the old memory-chip, with some lessons learnt thrown in.

Before starting I had read some books from the library on HTML, and started dong stuff at home using Notepad and the browser.  None of that namby-pamby WYSIWYG stuff!  DreamWeaver?  FrontPage?  Oi!

Before long I discovered Apache – I tell you, server-side includes were a revelation; and you’d be surprised what you can do with them.

I then did a website for the lighting company I was with (http://www.grouse.co.nz – since re-developed, you’d hope so since I did the first one in 1999 / 2000), and on the back of that scored a job with a web development firm.  Part of the reason I got the job was that although my breadth of technology experience wasn’t wide the developer who interviewed me was impressed with how much I’d gotten out of the technology I had used.

[Lesson #1: it doesn’t matter what you use – just how you use it.]

I started off with classic ASP, assisted by some VBScript and ASP reference material.  Looking up this reference material wasn’t hard – the biggest initial problem was figuring out which set of docs to look in.

After truly working out the boundary between VBScript and ASP I graduated on to database work – MS Access 2000 at first.  And yes, for publicly available web sites.  I can feel your skin crawl from here.

I was the “first employee” at the place where I worked, the existing developer as actually a company director as well.  We got on really well and had lots of fun, but eventually he’d had enough (not of me, I hope) and moved on; at which point I got thrown in the deep-end as the chief developer.

This was possibly the best thing that could have happened; the situation was ok, I was extended – but not to breaking point.  If you can get a situation like this it’s ideal – make the most of it.  Things weren't all roses but I stayed at it for five years, and by the time I left it was probably time to be moving on anyway.

I remember spending a few nights in a row working from home, I was taking a company laptop home to finish off an intranet solution.  Around this time I took an afternoon off to be with my son at hospital (approved leave etc).  Not long afterwards the boss comes down and (in front of the team) starts saying how good it was of them to grant me that leave "because you wouldn't get that if you worked in a factory, you know".  hmmm right.  I'm not sure if it was a pity or a blessing that was too stunned at the time to retort: "yes, but then factory workers don't take laptops home and work till midnight four days in a row, do they?"

[Lesson #2: Just because you aren’t having a good time doesn’t mean you’re not learning something – don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater (as the saying goes).]

Through-out all this time I still worked directly in code, but by now using NoteTab Pro.  There’s a lot to be said for learning how things work under the covers – AJAX is a great example of this; I strongly recommend tinkering around with the raw code yourself before getting a framework to do the heavy lifting for you.

[Lesson #3: Understand the under-lying technology before getting fancy.]

Worked on a few interesting projects; had a law firm that took about 18 months between saying they wanted a website and actually allowing us to start the build (!) – you need to have all the content written in advance, of course.

A colleague of mine wrote a mailing system – you know: enter your list of contacts here, enter content here, press send and hey-presto everyone gets email.  He got bit of a telling off when he was doing some testing and accidentally sent “lorem ipsum…” to all our actual clients.  Doh.

[Lesson #4 and #5: Set-up good automated processes to protect yourself from mistakes; pay close attention to detail – especially when you’re tired.]

Best yet, not me thankfully and I won’t say who or where… Someone was “trying something” and truncated a table in Production (I’m not sure why they were doing what they were doing in Production and not elsewhere), but the big snag was that when they tried to restore the machine all of this was running on failed as it ran out of resources.  Oh, did I mention the table had 25 million rows of data?  Doh.

[Lesson #6: Repeat lessons #4 and #5.]

It’s a pity really – you’d think I could remember better / more stories than these after 10 years, oh well, I guess my brains starting to fade already – I must be getting old.  I guess they'll all come back to me after I click on "save".