This post is part two of the series, completing my about page with more than just short paragraphs.

Like I already wrote, I started to learn coding with the book ‘HTML for Kids’. I than slowly started to play less games and focused more and more on coding, switching to Visual Basic for some time and later switching back to HTML, CSS, Java Script and PHP, doing some of my own projects which—I think—nearly every one, learning to code one of this languages, tries to get done.
Some of which have been a simple guestbook-script, a counter/analytics tool, a news script, an account management systems (user management) and for me in the end the plan was to code a ContentManagementSystem or at least a framework to use for website development. Most of this projects were shut down pretty quick caused by new ideas—how to do something—hitting my mind or new ideas for new projects.

In this time a friend of mine and I got our first client, who asked us if we could design and code a website—some HTML, CSS and PHP. For me it was the first time I had the experience working with a client and with a deadline! Doing the website was a little tone of work and we had to learn many things from scratch and redo the project some times before it turned out the way we and the client wanted it to be. Even though I have to admit in the end, it looked pretty good but if I look back at that website I’m not proud of it and wouldn’t add it to my portfolio but I’m proud that I did it, the way I did it, the time I did it—keeping in mind that was in 8th grade.

After that project, I started some other activities, projects like game-server hosting and trying some various things, like coding an own community site/social-network. While most of this ideas have been a mess, I learned so much through them that I think it was good for me, to learn different things and to get some experience in the field. And it fit’s my idea of learning something. I think that way of learning something is way better than school. Learning something just by hearing about it, writing down some lines and than learning till you get bored is not the way to go—at least not for me. I learn by doing failures, experimenting and getting hurt—wether it’s stress, money or just invested time. This process may take longer than the normal way but in the end it’s more of a value to me.

Doing all that also thought me something about me. Which is the reason I slowly moved away from this row coding sessions too more a project managing and ‘doing’ kinda thing. This mainly happened by discovering things like WordPress—which is a gorgeous CMS. Since than I started to use ready to use resources from the web to get my projects out there and to get client work done in less time than before when I had to code everything my self. Nowadays I use WordPress as a publishing platform—with a bunch of plugins—, PHP classes, a JavaScript framework—jQuery—and a reset css script—coded by my self.

Using all that made my workflow much faster and I’m happy about that because now I can focus on other things like actually bringing something out there rather than getting stuck in the early day development—even though I love to do some coding some times—and focus more on things like blogging, design, planing, collecting ideas, brainstorming or networking and of course photography.

Done! What’s next? Ah OK, photography! Stay tuned for part three of the series. If you want let me know your feedback or maybe tell your story.

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