My name is Pete Smith, and I’m a web developer who has been in the business for a long time. I started my career back when we hand-coded HTML, then we got fancy and generated pages via Perl scripts (which I didn’t write…I was more a production person in those days). From there I went through a terrible phase where I was a Lotus Domino developer. ::shudder:: I was glad to leave that behind and move on to Vignette Storyserver, coding in Tcl. Man I kind of miss Tcl! After that I got a job with a publisher who used ExpresssionEngine and after a lot of years there I’ve recently realized that I’ve kind of let my skills fall behind the curve.
Incoming War Story: When I was a Storyserver developer, the company I worked at decided to transition to Java Server Pages. While most of the team went to training, someone had to maintain (and continue to enhance) the Storyserver-driven site. That someone was me. When it finally came time to switch over to JSP, suddenly I found myself missing the skills needed to be useful. I was laid off (with a very generous severance package).
The company I work for now is a publishing company that is in the midst of pivoting to a digital marketing company. After many years of running a lot of fairly complex sites built on ExpressionEngine, the emphasis has switched to simpler sites built on WordPress. As that happens, guess who is maintaining the existing sites? Yup, me again.
Fool me once, and all that. This situation has caused me to think about future opportunities. While I had my nose buried in the ExpressionEngine templating engine, a LOT has happened in the world of web development. As I mentioned, I’ve fallen behind the curve.
So now I’m working to try to get current again. The happy side-effect of this is that I’m rediscovering the joy of development and learning new things. I started this blog mostly to have a place to tuck bits and bobs of useful information, but if someone else finds it handy too, that’s just icing on the cake! -May 26th, 2017