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I Love PHP

June 12, 2024

I spent a lot of time in my bedroom when I was 16.

As a teenager I used to visit my dad once a week. In 2005 he had just lost his job with Kodak and was taking some time off to up-skill.

One time I visited him while he was doing coursework for a .NET course. My eyes glazed over flipping through the boring 1,000 page Visual Basic book on the table in front of us, but then he turned his laptop to me. In the middle of the screen was a simple Frogger game he'd made... I was suddenly present.

My dad and I spent the night remaking the game. This time I was the student and he was the teacher. As we connected buttons with functions in the Visual Studio GUI Editor I was excited to see a different side of the programs I used every day on my slow Windows XP computer. I didn't know it then, but this excited feeling would soon become very familiar.

I remember going home to my mom's later that night. I remember it well because it was the night I realised I might want to be a computer programmer one day. I didn't know what that meant, but I knew I wanted to explore more of this secret world; the other side of my computer.

About three years earlier my dad liberated a cracked version of Photoshop 6 for me so I could edit photos of cars and my friends doing impossible skateboard tricks (skateboarding and cars were my two favourite things). Shortly afterwards I graduated to building drag and drop websites in Dreamweaver and hand framing Flash animations.

I often showed off these creations to my dad on my weekly visits. I suppose that made it easy for him to connect the dots, because on one visit after our .NET hackathon he told me if I wanted to learn to code I should look into something called PHP.


My mom worked in the only bookshop in the small town I grew up in. It was a chain store in the UK called WH Smith, and it was good because she loves books, but she loved getting books for me even more. One day I told her "I need a book on something called PHP". That night she came home with a book called "PHP in a Nutshell", and oh boy did I read it.

This book would change my life in the most wild of ways. It taught me about how the web works, what a database is, what a web server does, and so much more.

I loved learning PHP. I even printed out my first working script and put it on my bedroom wall. The script didn't do anything other than connect to a mysql database.

For months I would go to college and think about PHP all day, then I'd go home and write PHP all night alone in my bedroom. First I built a forum from scratch for me and my friends with a custom design I made in photoshop, then I made a content management system for my personal website, and a counterfeit bus ticket ordering website (me and my friends rode the bus for free). I just couldn't stop writing PHP.

My college tutor, Mark Cruxton at Stafford College, was also an experienced ASP developer. He taught me about functions as a way to encapsulate behaviour. So I went home from college and built a small e-commerce store with functions so I could show him the next morning. Through Mark's support and coaching I ironically decided to drop out of college.

Dropping out of college because your tutor taught you some simple programming skills is something only a naive teenager would do, but naiveté must have been my strength because at 17 I landed a job with a local web development shop called Trinity Design as their only PHP developer.

I worked with Trinity for several years before I moved to Gibraltar to work on the development team for a big gambling website in the UK called "William Hill Online". From there I kept going, I moved to London, started some companies, and built some startups from the ground up. But the adventure is not over yet.


With support from my parents, friends, employers, and tutors, I accidentally learned how to be a web designer and developer before I was 21. And the thing that started it all was a book on PHP.

PHP, you're a real one for that.