Introduction.
First of all I'd like to say this is a great app! Very nice admin part, nice interface, great skins. I like this, and especially the stats. Looking forward to watch .Text evolve over time :)
I'll begin by introducing myself I guess...
My name is David Cumps. I'm a daily visitor of a lot of the blogs here, got the Main feed aggregated with Bloglines.com which logs all entries, even if they're gone from the feed when I check it. Got a nice 150+ entries to read each time I logon :)
Some of my favorite blogs here are the ones from Wallace B. McClure, Robert McLaws, Frans Bouma and much more...
I must say I'm proud to be here among all these other big names =)
Now, something about myself:
I'm a student, at Hogeschool West-Vlaanderen - Department Simon Stevin, studying Toegepaste Informatica (Applied Informatics? Business Informatics?). I'm Dutch-speaking as you can see, from Belgium actually.
Currently I'm in my second year. Only one more year before it's over ;)
My personal blog can be found at Pixie.be, which now uses a skin from .Text, but runs on a PHP/MySQL back end with Nucleus as CMS (and funny enough, is hosted by a hosting company called Nucleus as well).
Everything I did so far can be found on my professional site located at Cumps.be (Dutch-only).
I've been coding since 1998 (which is late in comparison to all of you), started with Quick Basic and got my way op to VB6.
Before that I mainly entertained myself with HTML, and hex editing all kinds of things. Computer age started at 7 years with an Amiga 500 for me.
Since 2001 I got into PHP and since then everything went a lot faster. Thanks to PHP I started learning Object Oriented programming, and it was also the language that brought me in contact with businesses, the first thing I coded for someone else was in PHP.
When I reached this point, I had learned everything myself. And then came the time I started learning to code in school.
Some languages I saw (and still am seeing) were:
- Batch
- Bash
- Perl
- COBOL
- RPG
- C++
- ASP
- SQL
And most importantly: C#
The year before we started getting C# in school, I already started learning it, and boy it's great. I'm addicted to C#, even more then I ever was to PHP.
C# got me in contact with everything .NET related.
I love the framework, the power. It makes things much easier.
It's even easy to convert code from VB.Net to C#! :)
Now I'm at a point where I got a decent coding background, I made all the usual coding mistakes (and probably will make a lot more) and now I'm ready to start applying everything. Creating real C# programs for companies. Getting more involved with other programmers. Giving something back to all the resources that helped me learn things.
One of the things that encouraged me, was being confronted with what could be my future. I had first contact with Microsoft personnel, and they were so friendly and helpful providing me with developer resources, something I had never experienced before. MS folks were the first to discover as real coders. I had email conversations with some about coding stuff, something I otherwise never have, I'm more used to the local help-desk, answering questions and now here these ppl are, answering my questions. That's a real nice feeling. :)
I'm also attending the Belgian Dev-IT Pro Days (DevDays), with the support of MS.
Well, that's about it for now. I got nothing more to tell about myself. If you want to know something, just ask.
Greetings
David