This is me
Image by rachelandrew
This is me. I work on the web.
I run a web development consultancy called www.edgeofmyseat.com along with my partner Drew McLellan. I’m a web developer, an author and generally a geek.
I wasn’t intending to be a web developer or to have anything to do with computers. My father is a systems programmer so, despite being at school when typing was still taught on typewriters, I used computers from the early days. However I wasn’t interested and my dad’s attempts to teach me BASIC failed miserably.
What I wanted to do was dance and I left school at 16 after GCSEs to do dance and then music theatre at college. Aged 20, alone and exhausted in London, I quit dancing and blagged my way into a backstage job as a techie in the West End.
I had the time of my life working backstage, I loved it and was good at it. I enjoyed being part of a big show but not needing to be ultra skinny, or girly or pretty. I enjoyed the nocturnal life of a techie, going home on the tube as the suits were coming to work and I can still laugh to myself about some of the crazy things that happened in the year and a half I was doing that job.
Who knows what I would have ended up doing had I not become pregnant with my daughter. However that put an end to my career as a theatre carpenter and I was bored, knew no-one else with a baby, and all my friends were blokes who worked backstage. So I got a computer, my aim was to take typing in to earn some money as I could type reasonably well having had lessons at school. I did do some typing but also discovered the internet . An American site for parents called "Parents Place" was where I learned what you did with babies and found friends to talk to late at night.
At the time, if you wanted to share photos or other things online you had to learn HTML and so I did- from a guide on my ISPs website. Then I wanted to do "cool stuff" like popup windows and rollovers, so I learned JavaScript. That was fun so I figured out it would be nice to be able to write something like a guestbook … so I bought an old computer from an office seconds place, installed Linux (Redhat 5.2 I think) and taught myself Perl.
Somewhere along the way people started to ask me to build websites for them which was great but I didn’t really connect my new skills with being a way to earn money, as far as I was concerned I was more or less unemployable – an ex-dancer, ex-theatre techie with a baby. When my relationship with my daughter’s dad broke down and I needed to get a job I was amazed at the fact that my skills – learned on a couple of dodgy computers from online guides and the O’Reilly Camel book – were in demand.
So here I am, 11 years on from my first attempts to learn HTML, still learning things because they look cool and being fortunate enough that I can do interesting stuff for nice clients in my own business.
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