I recently accepted my first "real" Dev position. This has been a huge hurdle for me.

So my degree is in graphic design and it's pretty much what I spent the first 2-3 years after university doing. In fact, when I started at the place I am now (I am still working my notice) I was hired as a creative artworker.

I had always had a website I put together with some basic frontend skills, but always assumed the backend stuff was "beyond me". But, given the option here, I asked to be sent on a PHP course. Holy shit I took to it like a duck to water. Over the next few months I got my feet wet building a new website for the company, building out a little intranet, all that good stuff. I went from procedural spaghetti monstrosities to nice, OOP, documented code. It was beautiful. And no one here really have a fuck.

About 6 months ago, I started trying to leave. This was hard. I actually had several interviews for design positions, but always got turned down for some variation of "you're very technical and we think you'd get bored here" and thank god really, because they're right. I could never get a look in for Dev jobs though, because on paper I had no experience, hell my job title was still "Digital Designer" despite over a year of developing here.

But it finally happened. Through someone I used to know I got my foot in the door for a developer position. In the interview they even told me if it was a junior position they'd hire me on the spot - but sadly it wasn't. I had a good time though, a good laugh, and had a lot of fun finally, for the first time in my life, "working" and talking with other developers.

Over the next couple of weeks the agent kept telling me I had done really well and they were just dragging their feet getting things sorted, but I gave up hope a little. So imagine my surprise when I found out they turned the role into a junior one for me!

And so now, I get to go to a job where my job title includes the word "Developer". To some of you that might not mean much, but to me it's a fucking medal I wish I could mount on a plaque on my wall.

So I am redeveloping a website I made for work when I first started all this a year and a half ago. Part of the project was integrating with a marketing automation suite through an OAuth2 authenticated API - compounded by the fact that no one has heard of the thing, so there aren't plugins (wordpress last time, Drupal this time) or the ones that are there are woefully out of date/have no functionality.

Anyway, I've been dreading doing it. Last time it took me over a week (maybe two), and the solution was a total cludge fest - I had to do a load of stuff manually and it constantly broke anyway.

This time? Took me half a day, maybe less. All the user has to do is click a button and give the webpage permission in the automation suite (as you'd expect) and everything else is automated. It doesn't break, it doesn't fall over and it works very nicely.

It's the first time, apples to apples, I can see how far I have come, and I love it.

Now if only the API itself i am connecting to wasn't shite!

Go back to being a full time artwork/designer I suppose.

Past me is a dick.

"Do you know the HTML? I need an email template"

Nah, the website just fucking magically made itself, it was amazing.

Today I handed senior management an activity report dashboard for the system our product team thought was a black box they could use as an excuse to do fuck all.

Today I'm playing "increase the ini numbers til it works"

I think I hit the character limit in JSON.parse() but can't seem to find any documentation about it...

I have a small job I work with another team on Fridays. For the last 2 weeks we've had issues with an API for our accounts server not working correctly. It's been a shitter because it only accepts XML. I've been tearing my hair out all day and getting very little usable info from the company that made the API as we reached the point where we couldn't do anything else without the API working.

Today we discovered the issue. It's that the API receiving the XML was failing because the Bool values were in capital. As far as their API is concerned, "TRUE" != "true". Something not mentioned anywhere on their (incredibly short) documentation.

I might go insane tonight.

I've got this... thing. I built it when I first started with PHP. It's an OAuth2 system to pull form data from a service into a plugin, to make the rest of marketing's lives easier. It requires manually taking the initial received token and putting it into a database when doing the first auth. Occasionally it breaks and I have to try and remember the steps to get a replacement token to start the cycle over.

Someday I'll fix it, but for now... Let's fuck about with my browser for a few minutes to get the new token.

I keep a little box with decks of cards in it on my desk. Shuffling is a good way to keep my hands busy while thinking and solitaire with actual cards is a great way to unpick the knots in my head.

How about, instead of bitching about how bad it is that something that I had nothing to do with doesn't work, actually listen to me while I try and fix it.

Why is it whenever a task is something you've done before, and are confident it will take 10 minutes, it ends up making you tear your hear out for 2 hours?

I'm lucky in my current main ally in all things development. I am a digital designer who has kind of fallen ass backward into being the company coder - because I had to redo our website in 6 weeks. He is a database/data admin who has ended up the company sysadmin and IT manager.

Together, we put things together however we can to get things working. We probably aren't the fastest or the flashiest, but we get things done in a way I've not experienced in previous jobs - it's refreshing to work with someone in a similar mindset of rather learning a tool and implementing something properly, than either hiring a random consultant or doing a half-assed job.

Anyone else in the habit of having a PuTTy window signed into a personal server, for stuff like IRC, because it looks too much like work for the boss to question it?

Github starts having issues the second I try and get us to start using it instead of gung-ho edits. Coincidence?

I've just discovered I tried to call a status_header(404) after a content load on... An unreasonable number of pages. Which should have all just included back to 1 page anyway instead.