Thanks to PHP
When I was about 16 I discovered PHP and it changed my life.
Back then I used to visit my dad once a week. He had recently lost his job with Kodak and was taking some time off to up-skill. One night I was there while my dad did coursework for a VB.NET course. My eyes glazed over as I flipped through a book on the coffee table – it was at least 1,000 pages of dry Visual Basic lessons.
I had almost checked out when he turned his laptop to me. In a small window on the screen was a simple Frogger game he'd just finished. I was suddenly energized.
My dad spent the rest of the evening teaching me how he made the game. He walked me through making the user interface, defining variables, and writing the game logic.
As we connected buttons with functions in the Visual Studio GUI Editor I was excited to see a different side of the apps I used on my own computer. I didn't know it then, but this excitement for software would soon become my primary focus.
I remember going home to my mom's later that night. I remember it well because it was the night I realised I might want to be a computer programmer one day. I didn't know what that meant, but I knew I wanted to explore more of this secret world; the other side of my computer.
About three years earlier my dad had a friend at work who liberated a cracked version of Photoshop 6 for me. I used it to edit photos of cars and my friends doing impossible skateboard tricks. Not long after that I discovered Macromedia Dreamweaver and Flash, and I was now building drag and drop websites and keyframing Flash animations by hand.
I often showed off these creations to my dad on my weekly visits. I suppose that and our .NET hackathon made it easy for him to connect the dots, because he recommended I look into something called PHP.
My mom worked in the only bookshop in the small town I grew up in. It was a chain in the UK called WH Smith, and it was good because she loves books, but she loved buying books for me too.
One day I asked her to look out for books on something called PHP. That night I got home from school to a book called "PHP in a Nutshell" waiting for me. Oh boy did I read it!
This book would change my life in the most wild of ways. Looking back it feels like a pivotal moment but I had no awareness of that at the time. I was just having fun. That book taught me about how the web works: what a database is, what a web server does, and so much more.
I loved learning PHP and MySQL. I even printed out my first working script and put it on my bedroom wall. The script simply connected to a database and ran a query.
For months I'd go to college and think about my PHP projects, then I'd go home and write code until the early hours.
The PHP rabbit hole led me to learn HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript. At first I built a forum from scratch for me and my friends with a custom design I made in Photoshop. Then I made a content management system and a personal website, and then a counterfeit bus ticket ordering website (my friends and I got a lot of free bus rides to college).
I couldn't afford hosting for these projects, so I installed Apache, PHP, and MySQL on an old IBM laptop and setup dynamic DNS on the home router.
My college tutor, Mark Cruxton at Stafford College, moonlit as a freelance ASP developer. One quiet day he learned I was into PHP and taught me about functions and encapsulation.
At that point I wasn't reusing code, I just duplicated logic in each file. But that night I went home from college and built a small e-commerce store with functions so I could show him the next morning. Through Mark's support and coaching I ironically decided to drop out of college to get a job.
Dropping out of college after learning some basic programming skills is something only a naive teenager would do, but naiveté must have been my strength, because at 17 I landed a job with a local web development shop called Trinity Design as their only web developer. The director, Simon Key, paid me £17,000/year and fed me an endless stream of projects, forcing me to develop the confidence and secondary skills I'd need to be a good engineer.
Several years later I moved out of my small English town to Gibraltar where I worked on the development team for a national gambling company. Things kind of snowballed from there. I moved to London, developed a love for startups, and learned how to build some from zero to one.
With support from parents, friends, employers, and tutors, I serendipitously fell into a career building software and startups. And the thing that started it all was a book on PHP.
Thank you PHP