Tuesday, January 20, 2004

After just reading this article at RedDev.org and the article to which this is related over at htmldog.com I was left pondering how my skills have developed over the past 5 years. There was a time when I left Uni with a music degree that the web was a place where I downloaded samples and read about when Star Wars would start filming. The next step was that I enrolled in an html nightschool class and learned in a 4 weeks how to hand code basic web pages. This was then put into practice at work when I had to build help files for a software package. It was basic stuff but it gave me a good grounding in hand coding. Over the following years my html knowledge and netscape workarounds grew as my flash skills also improved. Suddenly I was coding and understanding actionscript, understanding OOP and feeling pretty safe in my job.

Then I came to Australia...

By the time I got here there had been a definite shift in the web world and suddenly web designers were not really in massive demand unless you were a web developer as well. So then came the next step, I taught myself basic coldfusion, mySQL and more recently I'm learning Flash Remoting. Further to that I am now striving to code with Web Standards in mind after being well and truly educated by Jeffrey Zeldman, I am not a complete table-less convert yet as I still believe my target audience may be using netscape 4.x but I have put the hybrid xhtml/css method into practice with as little presentational xhtml as possible.

So are we now Artistic Developers, Web Mechanics or Creative Technologists?

Jon 2:34 PM Permalink