In honor of the 20th birthday for PHP, my good friend Ben Ramsey has been asking people for stories of how they first got into PHP. It's hard to think that I've been doing PHP for more than ten years at this point, and that is only half of the lifetime of PHP itself.
I myself got into PHP development when I was working for a local ISP in Northwest Ohio. I'd been doing HTML for many years before that since middle school, and had been doing static websites for friends and family up until that point. I'd dabbled a bit in Perl when I had to start working on a shopping cart/ordering system for a family friend for his business. Suffice to say, I wasn't terribly happy with Perl. Deploying was a nightmare.
I was introduced to PHP by Matt Wiseman, who was a coworker. He had me take a look at phpSlash and suggested that I look at this PHP thing. While I never actually did anything substantial with phpSlash, I did start looking at PHP more closely.
Since then I've obviously managed to make a career out of using PHP. I've made countless websites and applications, built so many horrible frameworks and libraries, and made many mistakes along the way. I've also made friends with so many people in the PHP Community, and I wouldn't be here without all of my friends and the family that is the PHP Community. I get to work with a language I love, on projects that I find challenging, and with people that are awesome.
Here is to 20 more years.