The Story Behind “It was love at first include”

You can see the phrase on my Web Development Portfolio page. While that’s a little snippet there’s a story behind it. It all began back at the end of 2009, I moved from Los Angeles, CA to Las Vegas, NV. This part of the tale is not all that unique, I moved for a relationship I was pursuing at the time. I also made an assumption that didn’t pan out. I thought, my years of console/computer video game experience would help in getting a job. Rather a job at a slot machine company.

I was wrong…

Moving back wasn’t an option, so I had to take a look at my skills and how they could lead to a job or career shift. I decided Web Design could work. While I had built a website before and a few MySpace CSS layouts, I was far from confident. So I picked up Sams Teach Yourself HTML And CSS in 24 Hours. Now the idea of the book was to do 24 one hour classes… I on the other hand went through it over a weekend. I built a few website projects to add to my portfolio.

That led to my first job working on websites. I had mentioned to one of my coworkers that it was a bit tedious to update the navigation on every HTML page. That’s when they asked if I knew about PHP. I had no idea about PHP or what it could do and their response was “Look up the include function.” With that, I was off to PHP.net and found the include function. Now I won’t get too technical but I will show you what it is:

<?php include "filename"; ?>

That’s it. That little line was all it took. It lets you include a file in other files… so it allowed me to have one file that held the navigation code. One file to maintain!

From that point on I couldn’t get enough of it. I learned more and more about PHP. Then eventually databases and MySQL. It was the springboard in regards to learning and my success in web development. This was also the point I realized how passionate I was about learning. One simple line of code was all it took to show me that as long as I was willing to learn nothing could stop me. Slow me down? Sure, but I was in control of “being stopped.”

That’s why “love at first include” has remained when I talk about getting into web development.