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@b0rk from online tutorials and the php documentation in ~2000.

@janl @b0rk I sometimes think if I were starting out now, it might be much more difficult.

Back in the day, it was easy-peasy: shared hosting with PHP, database, and FTP access. I’d just upload files, see what worked and what broke, rinse, repeat.

@ramsey @janl i'm not sure I'll ever understand the "it was so easy to develop with PHP + FTP" thing, it kind of feels like you had to be there

(it sounds hard to me, like developing with no version control?? no push to deploy? no local dev environment?)

@ramsey @janl absolutely not trying to criticize! just a bit surprised to hear it described as "easy" :)

@b0rk @janl All I had to do was focus on the code. I didn’t have to learn those other pieces at the same time, which, to me, would have been pretty big hurdles. There were very few moving parts, so to speak.

@ramsey @b0rk @janl Yep. Edit a file in notepad, drag it to the server in WSFTP or CuteFTP, and your changes are live.

I wasn't as much of a fan of developing apps with DBs and logins that way, but it was still eminently possible.

@ramsey @b0rk @janl for the more complex systems, i liked Allaire HomeSite (later purchased by Macromedia/Adobe). It allowed me to configure one-click FTP site deploys directly from the IDE.

@kboyd @b0rk @janl I used DreamWeaver. By then, I was working for a company, but we still didn’t use version control or any special deployment systems.

@b0rk @janl I suspect there’s a large number of folks who accidentally became professional programmers in the 90s and early 00s, and I wonder if that’s something that could be replicated today, or was it unique to that time period?

@ramsey @b0rk @janl

Yep, that’s me as well. I taught myself as teenager when I was in secondary school.

Even after school I didn’t want to do this as a career, but studied physics and chemistry. Tried for over a year to get a job in that field without success before I considered doing software development as a job. Sent out a single application for a job as web developer, got offered that job, and decided it must be a sign.

That was 20 years ago. And I’m still doing software development.

FWIW, my kid (11) is super interested and is teaching himself all the same stuff in much the same way.

First JS/html/css, then Kotlin. Now he’s spent the last few days battling with a raspberry pi to set up a SQL server, and is determined to learn sql.

But not sure that alone will lead to a professional career: he’ll have to study something related if he still wants to pursue this as a career in a few years time …