I’ve been building websites since the late 1990s. At the time I was working as photo editor for ABCnews.com, and it gave me an appreciation for the potential of a dynamic database-driven website.
I started building websites professionally as an adjunct to my photography business. I used CSS for styling, semantic HTML for templates, PHP for information architecture and jQuery for interaction and animation. These code languages work well together.
WordPress eventually put all the pieces together for me. Web design has come a long way from the crude beginnings in the 1990s, and at last I could quickly and easily build sites the way they should be built—in a way that is simple to edit and maintain, powerful, flexible, and secure. When I made my first WordPress install I immediately thought it was the most elegant, simple, and flexible CMS I’d seen. Since 2010 I’ve been happy to be a full time Web developer.
As I kept on building stuff on the web I started to realize the important role JavaScript plays in front end web development, and find myself spending more and more time coding JS. In 2016 I spent the entire year building Angular components for Fidelity.com.