This is a special time for me. Not so much because it's the holiday season, but because it's a reminder of grimmer days where I would be dreading the coming of the Lunar New Year.
In fact, it had just turned 2010 when I found myself looking for a new job. The company I was working in had gone bust. I'd just been working the past ten months without pay, trying to finish the company product, an ambitiously-scoped MIS developed in classic ASP.
But before I continue...
The Short Version
I learned PHP from a book.The Long Version
For the backstory and all, read on.Being unemployed
It was no fun. While I hadn't been paid the past ten months, I had still been working, hoping to turn a corner. Now I was without a job and worse, without work. Other than send out resume after resume, I hadn't much to do to distract me from the growing anxiety. Just a month into it, and I was feeling more dead than alive. My temper was growing short. I was getting antsy. My parents and I were raising our voices at each other all the time, and at some point one of them remarked that I was really difficult to live with when I had nothing to do.Then I landed a job.
It was in a fairly big company, and they were in need of someone with web development experience. The catch was, this was a technical support job. Yes, this had deja vu written all over it. But I was desperate enough to take it.
After a week, they told me to go.
I guess I hadn't done a good enough job of hiding my distaste for the desktop support portion of the job. I'd never been fired before. Boy, did that suck. But it did increase my determination to never again take up a desktop support job.
The problem was, I didn't want my folks to know. I was too goddamn old to have my parents worry about me. And I just couldn't handle another day of their well-meaning but frustrating attempts to help. My mother had a lot of useful advice. That is, advice that would have been useful back in the 90s when she was still part of the workforce. And as for my father, he kept trying to hook me up with some contact or other that he claimed would give him face and employ me. Yes Dad. I know you're a big shot businessman and your reach is wide. But your son isn't so fucking useless that he needs you to secure a job for him!
Compounding the problem was that the main item in my skillset, classic ASP, was on its last legs. People were asking for ASP.NET now. The other popular keyword that kept coming up at that time, was "PHP".
Well, I needed to keep up the appearances and make it look like I still had a job. And I needed to look into PHP. So what did I do? I put on my shirt and tie every day, wore my good shoes, and headed out in the morning as if there was still an office to report to. And hit the library, where I would take refuge till 5pm.
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| My first PHP textbook |
The First Look at PHP
I picked up a few books, and spent some quality time looking through them. And my mind was blown. I had a foundation in C++, honed by proxy with frequent practice in JavaScript. The syntax was similar to these languages. Hell, it was almost identical. If I practiced the syntax diligently, I would have no trouble replicating what I already knew how to do in classic ASP. As I read on, I felt a sense of growing excitement. I could totally do this shit.The next part, after all that reading, was doing. For this, I called in a favor. An ex-classmate ran his dad's company, Pan Greatways Technology. He kindly allowed me to occupy a small corner of his office daily and use his power supply and internet connection.
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| Where my comeback began. |
There, I painstakingly set up my first WAMP stack, installing and tinkering with Apache, MySQL and PHP. My coding was done in Notepad. For my server, I was running a beat-up IBM Thinkpad.
It was madness. It was frustrating. I fucking loved it. My fate was back in my grubby little hands, and there is no feeling more liberating, and consequently intoxicating.
A week later, an opportunity arrived.
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