I am currently working as a Development Manager for Kanetix Ltd. I started my IT career in 1997 as first level Technical Support Analyst at many different clients in many industries supporting many systems and apps. During this era of my life, I spent many hours on Photoshop (started with using version 4). My first computer was a Commodore Vic 20 and I copied lunar lander program from the manual to the screen, saved it to my tape drive and it ran successfully!
In university I used PINE for email and Lynx and Mosaic for web browsing. Later, when Netscape and Flash came along, the web became more graphical and appealing - it was then when got interested in the web and how it worked. I started looking at source code and thought... "this looks like Japanese to me, I will never figure this out!" By the way I think the Japanese language is really cool.
But persistence, many questions, trail and error, many mistakes and reading some books paid off.
I was never much of a reader, but I bought a book titled "Teach Yourself HTML in 21 days" by SAMS Publishing. I like to learn by doing, so this book was up my alley with examples and visuals. The book made me feel like I knew what I was doing AND it looked good at work on the cafeteria lunch table - because it was about 4 inches thick!
I eventually taught myself HTML, CSS and JavaScript to the point where I was confident enough to make some static websites that look nice. Back then I used tables to layout my sites, now I use div's and css - (i hardly do design these days).
I moved onto learning dynamic languages and servers like Java/JSP/Tomcat/Oracle, PHP/Apache/MySQL, Classic ASP/VBScript/MSSQL. I took a course on Java Servlets, another course on VB.NET in which I attained 98% and I have been using DOT NET since 2008 - mostly writing in C Sharp. I enjoy using the ASP.NET MVC Framework the most!
These days I am busy with raising children with my wife, and managing a small dev team. But still enjoy trying to solve problems and motivate team members!