I think I've learned something new almost every day I've been here, and I believe that I'm working with some of the best WordPress developers in the industry.
That was the mantra of my 8th grade Civics teacher, Ms. Bonner. Every day at the beginning of class, we had to recite that line. It basically means that what you learn, no one can ever take away from you. And now, 30 years later, it’s been continuously popping into my head for about the last 6 months.
Even though I’ve been programming since the 80’s when I started with BASIC on a TRS-80 Color Computer and creating websites since the mid 90’s, the world of WordPress and Open Source is completely new to me. Until the end of the last year, I had worked on almost nothing that wasn’t a large-scale enterprise software type of installation in my corporate jobs. The ease of installation, the simplicity of the user admin, the large and very helpful developer community and the ability to create almost any type of website imaginable within the WordPress framework was very attractive to me. So attractive, that I quit my corporate job to start developing with WordPress full-time.
Once I got started, I found that there were often several different ways of accomplishing the same tasks, but each way had different advantages and disadvantages for the users and the maintainability of the code. Things that were so simple before, such as creating a hierarchical menu of sub-pages of different topics, became incredibly difficult, and I was spending a lot of time researching different approaches to the same problem and spinning my wheels. Luckily, Infomedia and I found each other through the local WordPress community and Twitter.
I think I’ve learned something new almost every day I’ve been here, and I believe that I’m working with some of the best WordPress developers in the industry. I have a feeling that I’ll be repeating that line in my head for a quite a while to come, and I can’t wait to see how much more I’ll know by the end of the this year!
Photo credit: Some rights reserved by www.audio-luci-store.it.