How did you get into development?

[thecodedrift]

This question came from the old anonymous AMA I used to have. In relaunching the AMA concept on GitHub Discussions, I wanted to bring over as many of these as I could

[thecodedrift]

I started out doing random code jobs in college, mostly hacking together solutions given the university's limited budget. (There was a lot of stuff solved with Microsoft Access. I'm not sorry.) Eventually, I got an opportunity to work as an hourly contractor at the Homeland Security Digital Library. Where I was one of two engineers in the midst of a team of Librarians. We were responsible for maintaining something called the Scout Portal Toolkit a PHP app that ran behind the large Java monstrosity that made up the widget-filled main portal.

Maintaining a library that was already in-use didn't require significant changes, freeing up time for me to really learn more about PHP beyond the template tools we were working on. I got a little bit better at things, decided I wanted to move my website from Movable Type to something running PHP, and spent spare time at work building a moderation tool for a website I loved called Gaia Online. At the time, the site kept track of member "bans" via a forum thread, where volunteers kept a manually alphabetized list of users, warning counts, and bans. It was tedious, we overwrote each others' work a lot, and it was generally sucky. At some point, it came to a head in IRC and I made the comment that if there wasn't resources at the company I'd do it myself, for free, for our sanity.

So. I. Did. And the result was a job offer to work full time as a developer at the company.

That's a long way of saying I built stuff, fixed things around me with code, and let that take me to my first full time job as a software engineer.