Post Titles Are Such A Nuisance
Sunday, February 20, 2011 at 10:16PM I'm learning PHP and loving it. I love programing in general. It's a nice change from coding plain markup and style sheets. HTML and CSS are fun, but the difference between those and what I have been learning is like building and painting a house or building a robot to build the house for you. It's given me a greater appreciation for what goes on behind the scenes of a CMS like Wordpress or Drupal, as well as made developing with them a lot less daunting.
Crafting arrays and loops and functions and then writing a few lines of code that utilizes those things in interesting ways is very satisfying. It's even more satisfying finding ways to reduce my file sizes, trim my code, and make it more streamlined and concise. The techniques I am learning brings back fond memories and the feeling of satisfaction that I would get from building a game in Flash back in school.
I feel like I've been a slacker for the past few years, and now I'm trying to make up for it. After I finished school, the work I was getting didn't require me to use things like Flash and Actionscript, and Lingo, and my programming aspirations went by the wayside. The classes I've been taking have rekindled that love for programming and I'm now pursuing my aspirations of becoming a web developer.
It still amuses me to think that I started university majoring in painting, something I still love, but that analytical problem solving side of my brain devours web development. When I'm at my computer I get more out of looking at lines of code than the finished product. When I see a site I like, the first thing I want to know is what was used to craft it. I've already got some ideas for web app I'd like to create in PHP. Hopefully I'll have the tools I need to get started on those very soon.