One man’s voice

Career Day

Posted on September 28th, 2007 in General, Personal Messages

A few weeks ago I attended a planning meeting for our Homeschool group LINKS. One of the activities that was brought up at the meeting was Career Night, an evening where kids from the network and several local private schools are invited to listen to working parents talk about their careers. I volunteered and was accepted as a speaker and tonight I got to speak about web development.

I had a fairly large group of kids and a few parents. Many seemed to be somewhat interested in some aspect of web development. A few of the kids seemed totally bored out of their minds. I had one parent that was so enthused by what she kept me after my presentation for about half an hour to talk to me about getting started in developing web sites, web apps and web pages.

Overall it was a fairly useful 20 minutes for the members of my group. I had fun recalling my early days of learning HTML from a magazine my father-in-law gave me back in 1998. And how I progressed through static stuff to a little more progressive stuff like CGI scripts and Perl. I then talked about how I learned PHP and SQL, then how I decided it would be nice to “speak” multiple languages so I picked up ColdFusion, ASP, C#.NET, JavaScript and the like. I also made to mention that I was able to learn on my own without having to go to school, and to this day I do not have a college degree.

It is my belief that anyone can learn anything if they want to enough. And it is my belief that if you really want to learn how to write web pages, web apps or web sites, you can. All it takes is a desire to learn and enough stubborn to not give up after the 50th time you get the same error message even though you know you must have fixed it 100 times already.

So if going into web work is your thing, let me encourage you to give it some serious consideration. It is very rewarding, very fun and well worth the effort it requires to learn.