Life as a web geek, pt 1

I love my job. I really do.

Now, I know many of you are rolling your eyes and thinking 'what a dweeb!'

Okay, I am. A dweeb who's got a job doing something he's always wanted to do. That's right everyone, I am a professional Cold Fusion web developer.

Let me tell ya. Web developers make the WWW go 'round. Everything you read, every online poker game you play, every porn site you drool over was built by a web developer. But, I digress. (This is a post for another day.)

A few short months ago, I was working a thankless help desk job when one bright December morn, I received a email from the DFWCFUG mailing list. A local company (Zunch Communications, Inc.) was looking for a junior Cold Fusion developer for immediate hire. Cha-Ching!

Realistically (or cynically, you might say), I never expected to get the job. Aside from my Chaos March site, I hadn't done any serious programming in a long time. With apologies to the great Inigo Montoya, I studied rather than pursued Cold Fusion for several years. I showed off the Chaos March site, it being the only one I'd worked on recently.

Now, I'd been trying to land an entry-level web job like this for years. Man, it's hard to get one without a decent portfolio to show off. As I said earlier, I never expected to get the job. So, imagine my surprise, during the second interview when they said I got the job. Wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.

In the six months I've been here, I've worked on a half dozen sites. I've worked on eCommerce sites, brochure sites and general information sites. All of them have really challenged my programming skills. I thought I was a decent programmer. Turns out I have a ways to go before I reach 'decent' status. j/k.

I love my job. I really do. It's the clients we have to work with sometimes that make me understand why some animals eat their young. Harsh, but true.

Words of wisdom: Learn CFML, Javascript, ASP.NET, CSS, DHTML. Learn all you can, code pages day and night, build up a portfolio of sites demonstrating your skills, then brace yourself for the ugly reality that you still don't know enough.

Moral of the story? Uh, dreams can come true. Perserverance pays off. A good angle shot is essential in foosball.