How long have you been coding?

[kvfb97]

I thought i'd ask this as i've been looking at some of the first posts of members off this forum (such as CA, Useless, Doobdee etc.) and they don't seem to be working with phpBB for that long (around 2 years).

Just wondering, how long has everyone been working with programing and phpBB?

Also, how did you learn? Did you jus pick it up yourself or did you goto college and study it?

This only really applies to the more experienced users such as CA etc...

Thanks.

[UseLess]

Greetings,

The history...

- 1982 bought a Sinclair ZX Spectrum and proceeded to type in simple BASIC games from magazines. Almost all of these games did not work, for one reason or another which at the time made no sense at all as I HAD typed it in exactly as shown in the magazine, so being about half way through typing in a 6 page 2 columns per page listing I stopped. I then loaded, from tape, a previously saved game, got the manual and then ran it and got something like (if memory serves) '21 - variable not found' which made no sense to me at all.

So after a study of the back of the manual and a serious look at both the listing for the game and the code I typed I started to change what looked to me like a '1' to 'l' (lowercase L). I then ran it again and changed it a little then ran it again and changed it a little more then ran it again and changed it still more and then finally I ran it and it worked. Well I was from that moment hooked on Programming.

I then started dabbling in Z80 Assembly and doing all sorts of weird and wonderful things with the Spectrum, mainly crashing it... but it was fun and I was learning.

- 1985 I Bought an Amstrad CPC464 with Green Screen Monitor and continued my BASIC programming along with Z80 Machine Code. By about 1989 or there about this machine ended up with;

- a coloured monitor
- a 6128 ROM
- a 64K memory expansion
- 2 3" disc drives
- 2 ROM boards with various roms 2 of them being Maxam and Protext along with a couple of RAM modules I built which would simulate a ROM

I had reached a level where I could take a game from tape and put it on disc and it would work, even the ones with headerless blocks. I even wrote a few programs that would work from ROM just utils but they were handy when it came to increasing my game collection

- 1990 Bought and Amiga 500 and was just blown away by the very impressive graphics and the games my favourite was Swiv and my wife liked it aswell. It was at this point that my son who was at the time about 18 months old and just walking did something I didn't know could be done. He inserted a 3.5" disc into one of the external drive I had upside down, I had to take the drive to bits to get the disc out.

I learnt 68000 machine code which was strange and very different to Z80 but also a lot more powerful and faster. But the custom chips in the Amiga were a pain to program... all those numbers... they used to drive me nuts. Many a spectacular crash was to be had getting one of those numbers destined for a custom chip wrong.

The time with the Amiga was not long lived as I had an interest in Electronics and at the time there were not a lot of electronic related programs available for the Amiga.

- So in 1991 I got a PC. An Amstrad PC 2286 with a whopping 20Mb Hard drive and 1Mb of RAM. It also sounded like a tank when started up. But I started to fiddle with MS-DOS and QBasic along with GW BASIC. I also started learning 286 machine code.

1992 saw the purchase of a 486DX33 it came with a fantasticly big 80Mb Hard Drive and I think 8Mb of RAM a 5.25" disc drive and a 3.5" disc drive. I continued programming and also playing with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 also tried GEM at one point it was just a shame this never took off.

I used the machine mainly for Electronics related stuff and in 1994 I passed the Amateur Radio Exam which meant I could now use the computer for even more fun stuff.

I learnt to program in Visual Basic 3 which was very weird to say the least. It was the idea of putting a control on a form and just writing the code that dictated what the control did that got me for a while. After all I was used to writing the code that generated the control and what it did... not just the code for what it did. But I finally got it.

I was then, not sure when, introduced to Pascal by a friend and never looked back at VB again, until I got a job programming mainly in VB at which point there was a very steep learning curve going from a back ground of VB 3 to VB 6.

I continued to fiddle with machines until I got a job as a hardware technician for Escom I ended up being the Technical Manager of the local store for 7 weeks as they closed it. A few weeks later they closed all the stores in the country. I then got a job with Byte - The Computer Superstore which was fun, worked with a great bunch of people and even got to go on a couple of courses for Toshiba laptops and AST Computer laptops and desktops.

I got access to the internet in about 1996 or 1997 and then started playing around with web stuff. As I had accumulated a few machines one of them was turned in to a server so that I could develope stuff off line.

In May 2003 I was introduced to a forum by a friend and they were trying to create a template for posting on the forum. I got involved and we got it all working it was at this time I started with PHP and MySQL and phpBB. I learnt PHP by just reading the manual and trying out some of the examples in the manual and changing them etc. I learnt how phpBB worked by looking at the scripts that make up phpBB.

There you have it a condensed load of useless history.

[kvfb97]

That really is amazing... Cheers for tellng us all. Very interesting

[Disturbed One]

Here's my life story

1. I was born in a Navy hospital in Orlando, Florida.
2. In October of 2003 my dad gave me Macromedia Studio 4, and I taught my self how to make HTML web pages (visually)
3. December 2003 my dad gave me FrontPage 2000, and I got FP 2003 a few weeks later.
4. In January of 2004 I bought Adobe Creative Suite CS
5. I started to get into the coded view and started to teach myself HTML around summer of 2004
6. August 2004 came the time when I decided my website needed a forum, and I found phpBB. I knew no knowlwdge of phpBB whatsoever (look at my first posts on this forum).
7. In November of 2004 I started to actually customize phpBB and get into understanding php better

From there I've been building up on my php knowledge and more on my graphic design.

I'm still not the best at php (but good enough to work my way around and code a website in), and in the past month I have really been working on interacting with the database, which is very fun and really expands php possibilities.

I give most credit for my knowledge of php to the phpBBStyles community. After seeing Morpheus and the customizations on this website, I was inspired to work with that stuff (Morpheus was my first phpBB template I used).

Well that's my chunk of useless junk

[UseLess]

Greetings,

3. December 2003 my dad gave me FrontPage 2000, and I got FP 2003 a few weeks later.

I wonder why a parent would inflict such pain on a child... and then you go and and inflict even more pain with the later version...

[kvfb97]

Well then, heres my life story:

1. Was born in Craigavon Area Hospital on the 1st of May 1989.
2. First introduced to a computer in 1999. Mostly used figuring out how to play flight simulator 98...
3. Started off using Front Page 2000 (in 2000) with a trial version off a CD which my brother got in a web design magazine.
4. Created my first proper website in 2000 with FP (as above) called 'Rabs Chelsea Site' - it was a great sucess with about 5 unique visitors each week... but i was pleased with it; i was learning.
5. Then got a trial of Macromedia Flash off a CD. Looked at it once and never opened it again... couple of weeks later i started learning the absics of it, mainly from www.kirupa.com. Brilliant site!
6. Couple of years pasted and i learnt more and more about computers everyday, until about 2003 when i got my own. Since 1999 i continuoulsy crashed the computer of my dad's thats why he bought me my own.
7. In 2003 my brother got my the macromedia MX suite was pure class to beable to use it for more that 30 days...
8. Found a mate from a forum i was on who new a little bit of PHP and other languages. Since then i've been learning from him, still am infact!
9. Late 2003 i found this site. Great find. Came across after a little bit of muckin' about with phpBB on my computer. I was in love for the first time. If you check some of my first posts you'll see how thick i was to start off

I'm now at college studing a nation diploma in e-media, which basically includes flash, fireworks, dreamweaver etc. and hopefully i will continue with this and progress to Uni...

I've progressed alot. Started knowing nothing at the age of 11 and now am creating professional Flash interactive sites, programming CMS systems, creating the odd custom theme for phpBB, and all at 16. God knows what i'll be doing in a few years time...

Think this is my longest ever post on here!

Edit: Btw forgot to mention in dept all the members on here; mainly CA, Useless and DooBDee. All of them have served a great help to me in the past i hope they will in the future...

[DoubleJ]

Well I learned very basic html @ school in 2003/2004
We had to code a site using frames(the horror(forme)).
Then the next schoolyear we learned php.
We learned how to print a form we made and how to assign variables.
Using databases/file commands everything else I learned myself.
Like now I am working on my own blog making an archive and so learning to deal with date functions(and although the blog will not be used much I have fun coding it and learning from it).
So overall I am now programming php around 1 year(and a few months)... and html for a small bit longer.

And I learned my php by examening other peoples scripts then found how to work with phpBB, and now use its functoins and all things on my stie.

[onii]

Wow... UseLess has been working with computers before most of us were born

First, I learned Java and html a few years ago in high school... then after I graduated in 2004 I became junior admin of a forum... then full admin with server access in August 2005
[quote user="Disturbed One" post="67708"]6. August 2004 came the time when I decided my website needed a forum, and I found phpBB. I knew no knowlwdge of phpBB whatsoever (look at my first posts on this forum).
7. In November of 2004 I started to actually customize phpBB and get into understanding php better

From there I've been building up on my php knowledge and more on my graphic design.[/quote]
Hey, this sounds just like me
Except I'm one year later... started working with phpbb in August 2005. So its been half a year... been teaching myself a lot. What also helps is looking at the code for other mods, and imitating their code to modify my own forum... also lots and lots of experimentation and trial and error. Its always fun when I look at some code and realize "Ah! now I see what this code does... cool!" Last month I just started understanding a little more about how MySQL works with phpBB.

Perhaps by next year I'll be at where Disturbed One is at now.

<-20 yrs old btw

[PostBot]

I started coding in 1993 in school learning Basic (it was old russian computers with its own operating system and its own Basic, similar to GW Basic). In 1994-95 was learning C (not ++, good old C for DOS) at programming cources, in 1995-96 was learning Pascal for Windows at same programming cources. In 1996 decided to test my skills in coding contest among country's schools and got 6th place in country (which isn't bad considering that I had no clue what tests will be at contest). Then in 1996 went to university in Moscow where they tought exactly the same as I learned before at cources but with completely clueless teachers and very old computers (mostly 286), hovewer at dorms network there were quite a lot of very good coders so I've learned some stuff from them. After 2 years of playing warcraft 2 and quake 1 on dorms lan I left university and for about 2-3 years wasn't programming at all and was busy with other stuff. Then returned to coding, but this time started with Delphi. Napster was very popular then so I created napster-compatible server software, created website for it, setup forum on that website with WBB. Because p2p development was a waste of time and money I started testing my design skills by redesigning that website few times, then created few websites for friends and learned php (php is very similar to good old C so it was very easy to learn it). Then when phpBB 2 was released I switched that forum to phpBB. Later decided that standard subSilver navigation is quite ugly, so I created custom style for that forum. Few users wanted that style for their forums, so I registered on phpbb.com and released that style as Classic. After releasing style I got few requests to do custom styles for forums, so I started doing custom work and then released few more styles. That's how I got in phpBB business about 3 years ago.

That's about it. I might have missed something and I don't really remember when I started coding php so that data might be slightly inaccurate.

[kvfb97]

Once again thats very interesting to hear. Hopefully i'll be just as smart, or experienced as you's later in life.

CA, do you work with computers (if you don't mind me asking)?

[PostBot]

[quote user="kvfb97" post="67778"]CA, do you work with computers (if you don't mind me asking)?[/quote]
What do you mean?

[kvfb97]

Do you work? As in a job in real life... e.g. a bin man

[PostBot]

No.

[baz-x]

I started coding about 1 1/2 years ago. I mean coding own scripts. I think I started using phpBB 2 - 2 1/2 years ago and still like working on it but my aim is to create my own CMS which I am working on for about 9 months.

[Disturbed One]

[quote user="onii" post="67763"]Perhaps by next year I'll be at where Disturbed One is at now.

<-20 yrs old btw[/quote]
Hopefuly you'll be even better than me in a year
Every day I learn more, but school and sports and other stuff get in the way.

<- 14 yrs old btw