The 40-Year Old Intern

In 1996 I saw a computer for the first time. I didn’t think much of it and continued with my mundane-post school young life. My life changed when I got more interest in computing about a year later. After learning the typical word-processors and powerpoints of the time, I dived into “programming” since I was fascinated by how they made programs. Thanks Microsoft for Visual Basic! I developed more form applications than I can remember. I may even have sent an email to …. bill@microsoft.com My life changed when a friend told me we could actually create webpages like what we were seing in the nascent Internet of that time. Hotmail was so beautiful! Yahoo.com was the page. So we learnt HTML and basic Photoshop for image editing and to create rounded corners for our banners…. We even dabbled in Perl. anyone? Come to think of it, where did Perl go? Roberts Perl Tutorial Then even better we learnt PHP3!! and a database (MySQL) to boot! I couldn’t have been happier. Hello World! (In the year 2000, we bought our first domain name from for $70/year!) Godaddy Then 17 years of my life passed. Doing the same thing. This is why I’m writing this article. From the year 2000 till this year, because of various things beyond my control, while employed occasionally and freelancing the rest of the times, I basically developed websites and simple web applications with HTML, very basic JS (window.alert anyone?), plain PHP (no frameworks) and MySQL. The only thing that changed was when in the last 5 or 6 years CSS then Bootstrap came. They made my life easier, but believe you me, I still never got a chance or time to learn or develop in any of the new technologies and frameworks. Family & Life happened in short. As we talk right now, I’ve decided enough is enough. I want to reboot for the next phase of my life. I want to learn the buzzwords I keep hearing about of late (the myriad JS frameworks, Angular, Node?, Polymer, Web components, Angular, React, front end development, full stack, back end, native and non native mobile app development, etc etc) I’ve started reading from experts and that’s why I’ve installed NodeJS today and MongoDB. I saw Introduction to REST video on Youtube yesterday. As STEP ONE. My desire is to develop a working application using Node, MongoDB and React and make it mobile with ReactNative or Flutter in the next 3 months. As we all know, learning via tutorials is difficult, but when you have an actual real project from a client or a mentor, it becomes fun. If you need a not so young intern who has developed a number of systems back in his days and is eager to learn, can be your guinea pig as you incorporate new tools in your stack, has a computer and internet in his home, has 8 solid hours available daily, will work remotely (so we save furniture costs!) and is English speaking, holla (or share this post with someone who could need an intern). I am your 40-year-old Intern. Thanks PS. I’m turning 39 sometime next year, but 40-year-old Intern had a better ring to it! I DON’T have a Github profile. That’s how much I was lost in endless corporate website projects over the last 17 years… I’m mostly self taught. I didn’t pursue computer science in college. About The Author I’m Sospeter and get me on remotedevske@gmail.com