Welcome to my blog! My name is Gareth, and I am a web developer who built his first website in 2005, back when Photoshop 7 and Dreamweaver MX were all the rage. My story actually begins after I graduated with a degree in English Literature and Ancient History from Queen’s University in Belfast in 2001. At a loss for what direction to take my career, I came across a Masters in Computer Science aimed at graduates with a non-technical background. It took some convincing, but I talked my parents into financing this endeavor, one in which I surprisingly excelled.

The World Wide Web was still sort of in its infancy, but there was no real push on developing websites beyond a token module on HTML. I learned how to program using Java, building some applications to run in a Java runtime environment.

Several years after graduating, a friend and I decided to start a website that reviewed heavy metal music, video games, and kung fu movies. Neither of us knew how to build a website, especially back then, but I ‘acquired’ a copy of Dreamweaver MX 2004, got my hands on a book showing how to build websites using Dreamweaver, and eventually cobbled together a website that did what we needed it to do.

At the time, my career was making progress in the world of IT where I had become a fairly accomplished project manager working for a software company that developed financial software. While working there, an opportunity came up to bring my web design (as it was known back then) hobby into my job. I took ownership of the web projects we were building — a range of static sites that helped clients promote their services and acted as a portal to a larger online banking website developed by the core software team. During this time, I learned more about PHP, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, ultimately leading to me learning how to code themes in WordPress.

I eventually moved on to work at various different web agencies, as well as taking on some freelance projects for even more challenges, where I have become quite proficient at building out web solutions using WordPress as a framework.

I consider myself a modern web developer in that I code fully responsive (mobile-first) web experiences with an eye on best practices from a coding point of view. As well as using WordPress, I have built sites using Craft CMS and Shopify, but I mostly operate in the WordPress space. I would actually call myself an advocate for WordPress because, despite the challenges of working with WordPress, I feel it does a great job at doing many things with a very rich pool of resources to pull from.

The downside to working mostly with WordPress is that, for the most part, it doesn’t lend itself to modern web development workflow practices. While I have dabbled with developing locally, using Git for version control, pushing to an online repo on Bitbucket, and even using SCSS to generate my CSS, I am mostly an old-school developer. I have managed to overcome a lot of problems using what I know to help clients. While my methods might not be considered ‘modern,’ I certainly feel that my problem-solving is strong, and I stand by that. I have talked to APIs, I have manipulated the contents of a shopping cart, I have created matrices based on spreadsheets from clients that step end-users through the process of creating custom pumps, I have created apps for Shopify and simple, internal-use plugins for WordPress, and I have created custom solutions that talk to Google Maps displaying points of interest all over Ireland.

I do, however, feel it’s time to take the blinders off and to dive deeper into what modern web development really is. To that end, I have started this blog to document my journey. I have a number of carefully selected courses in my Udemy account to work through going forward. I am sure there will be tangents along the way, but I would expect that. My goals and objectives might change as I work through different material and want to try different things.

At this time, there is no clear endgame here other than to embrace the journey and see where it takes me.