I have always been interested in computers, and would find myself hanging out with the Computer Science students instead of the Aviation Management or Business Management students I was a part of. At home and at work I have been largely self-teaching myself using computers starting with Excel and Access with VBA through ASP and SQL at work. Thankfully my current employer values education, and so I have been taking classes and not only learning the technology, but un-learning what I have been doing wrong over the years. At home, though, I have been teaching myself Linux, system administration, networking and the overall method of migrating our system from Windows to Linux. I am involved in the Danbury Area Computer Society (DACS.org) I have the opportunity to take what I've learned the hard way and hopefully help others.. I have been enjoying Open Source for a while now, and I am hoping to get a better understanding of the entire model and application.
Authored Comments
Work is primarily on our ASP.NET Intranets site and MS SQL Server back-end.
My career started with VBA in Excel to parse values from a text-based output thousands of pages long, without having to print it. Considering my degree was in Business Management and Accounting, I largely self-taught myself this as is.
In the past few years, however, I have been put to work on our external LAMP servers running Drupal and custom PHP websites using either Postgres or MySQL databases. Since I started it went from 2 websites to 5 I manage.
The move to LAMP and Drupal/PHP come my way because I have used Linux at home and developed in PHP for years. Just like my ASP and VBA knowledge self-taught at my last job, my Linux and PHP experience also came from self-teaching. Of course being something I do at home, there is less pressure to "complete" or to get departmental "sign-off".
Except once when a church asked for a copy of my auction registration and winning bid PHP site I used, after attending our fundraiser and seeing it in action. I had decided to developed it in PHP because the fundraiser uses individuals' computers and this way I didn't need to install anything, just set up a web server for everybody to connect to.
I've used and tweaked that site each year but alas, we don't run that auction anymore. So I am trying to see about moving the code into some sharing system (Github, or Gitlab, or whatever).
So the funny thing is, what I teach myself is what has driven most of my positive career moves and job changes.
Great information, and well written.
I'm not very good with networking, but this all seems to make sense (so far).