If you want to call me a "web developer" or a "computer programmer" or anything along those lines, I won’t argue. It’s how I’ve earned a paycheck for the past six years (give or take a year.)
But I don’t claim an entitlement to that label.
My development skills were learned on the job, and there are big gaps in my knowledge that a trained engineer or programmer fills at the outset. I didn’t even know the way I build my sites actually has a name.
So 2006 comes to a close, and what do I know that I didn’t know before? Let me list the ways:
- CPAN is my friend. I didn’t do much with PERL after I learned it in 1999, having switched to PHP for web development a few months after taking a PERL class. In the last two years, I’ve been writing a lot of PERL for text conversion — the language’s primary purpose — and CPAN really helped with taking care of really mundane things such as handling files, command-line options and XML parsing. Most people who develop with PERL know of CPAN off-hand, and I only got familiar with it when PERL was demanded of me.
- I can never be a tech writer. I tried to write some documentation in POD (Plain Old Documentation for PERL), and for the life of me, I had the hardest time describing just what my script did. I build scripts for tech writers. I should get them to write the documentation for me.
- My understanding of XML now goes beyond the notion of creating your own mark-up. I’ve had to deal with schemas, document types, namespaces, XPath and XSL. As powerful as XML can be, I consider it a necessary evil. I can’t stand working with XML.
- I can use XMLHttpRequest now. Debugging the results can be a pain, though.
- FrameMaker is such a pain in the ass. I learned that a long time ago, but it just got more painful the more I dealt with it.
- I read up on how to develop a Firefox plug-in. I might need to develop one for work. Greasemonkey may not be enough.
- CTRL+` is incredibly useful for switching between Japanese IME and English input in Windows.
- I’m fairly certain my web sites are few degrees of insecure, but I think I secured them enough in early development not to be a problem. I did stop a very insistent bot from making fake registrations to Austin Stories, and I took care of some SQL injection. Now I have to take care of the other common issues.
- I may have to learn Ruby since it seems there’s a lot of momentum in that direction.