Hi, My Name is Mike
I’ve never been a blogger, or very public at touting my wares. My current journey on the road back to web software development gave me the kick in the arse needed to get me to do so.
Drizzt Do’Urden talked about how, in one adventure, he was experienceing his third life. I find myself in a similar dynamic. Having been removed from the Internet for the last 5 years (at the time of this writing), I find myself in a unique position to remake myself for this next 1/3 of my life.
This is how long I have been around
I have been teaching myself to be a software developer since around 1996 and self-taught myself to a nice career developing open source ecommerce solutions for clients, for me and for the fun of it.
I started around 1995~1996. Events transpired that led me to start learning Perl. I really suck at Perl.
While struggling with Perl, I started to build with Minivend to satisfy requirements for a client. What a ride that was. mSQL was the next hot thing for me, which turned me on to MySQL of course. When PHP3 came out, a wombat talked me into trying it and I made the switch. The result was a super fun journey meeting people and building PHP/MySQL applications with them for every itch that needed scratching. (and some that didnt but the application was cool)
Soon I will add pieces of the stack(s) used in between the previous paragraph and the next paragraph right here
I spent a lot of time contributing to various communities relating to open source projects in the form of donations, or code, or being helpful to the developers or the user base. Community support is where I learned how to do a deep dive into an application I was just learning. Adopting other users problems as my own puzzles to figure out.
The scene in those early days was a lot of fun. 100 hour workweeks were nothing and I clocked that on a regular basis. It did not take me long to figure out that my strong learning skills were propelling me towards a solid career down a particular path. I enjoyed that path, the skills I learned remain with me. The lessons I learned were, in most cases, enjoyable, informative and profitable in the learning sense, not always in a monitary sense. At some point soon I will list the various bits and pieces I have made extensive use of over the years.
Which brings me to the now. After being away from the Internet for 5 years, I find myself in this wonderful position to have a choice in where I direct my career. I have resisted the pull to go back into infosec or systems administration, although if the right opportunity came along I would consider it. I love building bulletproof webservers. What I really believe I want to do is focus on jamstack/headless ecommerce.
My last project in progress before my internet hiatus was a variation of what, today, is headless eCommerce. I have never been a Javascript guy, nor a front end developer other than people would use the front of the applications I built. Thank God for bootstrap and free themes for all of those years because back then my visual design skills were limited. I was for SURE a back end/DevOps/SysAdmin developer!
In a series of posts, again, at some point, I will outline the thinking I had when I started on my own headless adventures. When I reconnected again, I was plesently supprised to find that other people had defined the protocols and methods far more clearly than I could have. VueJS, React and the other similar front end stacks are just a breath of fresh air for a guy like me. The emergence of low-code or no-code backend platforms are going to make life that much easier.
All of that being said, this brings me to the point of this site. I quickly realized that my skill set was not what it needed to be to participate in the jamstack revolution! Oh crap! You see, when I started programming, Javascript was an afterthought and in my last project, it was illegal to use. So here we go.
I have signed up for a few differnt code camp sites to teach me what I need to know to come up to speed. My programming background lets me read just about any kind of code and understand what it is about, but actually knowing how to write that code is entirely different.
The first of these code camps is Free Code Camp. Why? Because every journey starts with a first step and I needed to learn Javascript. Yep, 20 years I escaped learning JS and now here I am, busting my butt getting it done!
Over the next period of time during this third phase of my life, I will work towards being a highly quailfied jamstack developer. This will, I believe, unlock a lot of the stored up eCommerce knowledge I possess and let me share it with the army of solopreneur masquerading software developers and their clients. Let me clarify this a little, you see, I LOVE helping people make money on the Internet. More than anything I love a level playing field and seeing the little guys go head to head with the big guys and winning, even just a little bit. Yes, I’ll work for a big guy here and there, but that is not where my passion is. lol.. a small team of people running a 7 figure website? Yeah, that is passion.
So there you have it, the page that explains About why this site exists. The rest is going to come a little at a time, post by post, idea by idea.
P.S. I have not been active on social media for a long time, but I will gain velocity there once I catch up with school! Feel free to hit me up anywhere I have an account.