When I was in the fifth grade my mom and I went to the public library to look for books for us to read. Both of us went in opposite directions, and I ended up in the reference books section of the library. I found one book that offered to teach me how to build my own website in twenty days. I took it up on its offer and went at work teaching myself the basics. I did not understand the very first concept for many days and so got frustrated that I almost gave up. But finally I had a "Eureka" moment and understood it completely. The next few days was a breeze and before long, I had a simple, working webpage.
I grew to love tinkering with it and signed up with my first free webhost. I cannot remember the original URL nor the webhost itself, but it did not matter. I had a site that anyone could visit in the entire world. Mind you this was in 2003, where MySpace.com was just being founded. The Internet was just now becoming a household term. I was still working on a Windows 98 computer (and thought it was a high-end machine). I loved coding on that computer and would spend hours just trying out new things. I had HTML down pat. But then, I learned about PHP.
PHP is what is called a server-side programming language. Server-side means that all the processing and input is down on the computer hosting the page and then the output is sent to the client's browser. PHP seemed to be an easy language to learn and I set after it. To begin with, most of my scripts were awful little things, just trying to get the hang of it. Eventually, and with many working-days, I put together a little program called Jacwiki. Jacwiki was a simple wiki software program. It simply created, edited, and deleted pages. There was no media support. No WYSIWYG editor and not even database support. But to me, it was amazing. I loved tinkering with that little program but eventually just got tired of it. Finally, I started working on Ignition.
Ignition is the software program that runs and processes this very site. It was a year old in February and has come along way from 1.0 from having no ability to comment on posts, to being able to embed videos and mp3 files. I'm very proud of this little program. Not only because of what I created by myself, but from what all I have learned by coding it. This has been indispensable for me. I hope that Ignition will continue to evolve and teach more and more things.
From the day that I got that book, I knew that what I wanted to do with my life was to write websites. Jacwiki pushed me forward and Ignition is keeping me going. Hopefully, before long, I'll be writing the next Facebook or Google Docs. Fingers crossed. 
