about me and this site
December 14th 2011
Name: Darren Thomas
DOB: 13/04/1985
Nationality: British
Home Town: Croydon, London
This blog is my ongoing record of my attempt to master the ways of the code. I’ve had a huge interest in computers since a young age and I think built my own machine from bits of leftovers from my fathers upgrades when I was around 9. It was probably a DX2-66 too come to think of it.
A couple of years later my brother and I started playing with Visual Basic. He had gotten a PS1 and we decided that we needed to make a programme to catalogue all the assorted crap you could buy for it. The controllers, leads, joysticks etc all got added in for a time with the names and prices all taken from the Official PlayStation Magazine. Don’t ask me why we did it but we did. For some reason we stopped playing around with VB and while my strong interest in computers continued I didn’t take an interest in code again until I was about 24.
My brother on the other hand picked up again a few years later own his own PC doing all kinds of stuff. I think he tried game maker very early on, he set up his own sites, he hosted sites for other people and generally became more and more au fait with code in its many different languages. At 23 he is now the Lead Web Dev at a major travel agency and is just starting to pick up some freelance work which pays a little better.
I still to this day do not know why I stopped learning to code when it was a perfectly logical thing for me to pursue at the time. In the end I finished my A-Levels and started work in the TV industry a week later and it’s here I’ve been ever since. One part of that means lots of free time with little to occupy the mind and after nearly 8.5 years of it I’ve decided I needed to do something to keep my brain stimulated and to give me something else I might be able to do for money if I needed to.
Web development seemed like an ideal place to start, I can learn it with notepad and a browser at any time of the day and I have a wealth of real world knowledge to tap into from my brother should the need arise. It’s also all nice and logical and follows set patterns which are a way of working that I enjoy.
So here we are, this blog is one of the first things I’ve slapped together along with my testbed PlayStation Vita site. Maybe one day I’ll be able to make some money out of it but for now it’s all just about learning as much as I can and trying to use it in such a way as to keep me interested and keep all the information stuck in there. Already it’s been really interesting and I’ve been a little surprised at how quickly something can look so good if you just have the basics down.
So with that I’ll end my novel with a disclaimer. Everything you read here is just me playing with the development of my skills. There might be some handy tips or something along the road but for the most part it’s going to be the wayward ramblings of someone trying to learn a new language.