Darrell Brogdon

I've wanted to write code since I was ten years old. In many ways, I got lucky in that just as the web was exploding, I got a job at a newly formed web hosting company (we charged something like $30/month for one of those tilde accounts--http://example.com/~dbrogdon $60/month for your own domain!)

I started out learning HTML from the book, Teach Yourself HTML In 24 Hours. I think it took me a couple of days so, they oversold that a little. Then I heard about this new beta language in Netscape Navigator called "JavaScript". I still remember submitting bug reports to the team. It couldn't have been more than about three or four months old at the time.

At that same hosting company we allowed our customers to build websites in either Perl, PHP, or a language called HTMLScript (look it up!). I played around with HTMLScript but we had a couple of web sites written in PHP so I switched. Perl made my eyes water.

I somehow managed to transition from that to writing PHP full-time for https://sourceforge.net for a couple of years, until the .com bust caught up with us. For those that don't know of it; SourceForge was the GitHub of its time.

I've made plenty of mistakes over the years and have seen a lot of bad code and a lot of drop-dead amazing code. I've been fortunate to have worked with some incredibly smart and talented coders as well and I've made sure to learn something from each of them. I hope I can pass on some of that knowledge!