Hello. Welcome to my first article.

And my brand spankin new, made-from-scratch stab at programming. It’s going to be a bumpy ride: bumpy like fun-old-rollercoaster-bumpy not trainwreck-bumpy (universe willing).

Please allow me to rattle off some quick background facts so you know what planet I’m coming from. I’m a 26 year old retired bartender. I did that for more years than I care to say (ok fine, 8). I fancy myself an amateur artist; basically, I paint for therapy and fun. I’ve always liked things of a nerdy nature (i.e. writing very basic html in a webshell on angelfire when I was 13, Magic the Gathering, guys who majored in Astrophysics, etc). I consider myself very confident and intelligent, and it’s a shame that went to waste for so many years. That being said, years of bartending with no substantial plans for the future wore me out and made me feel quite desperate for awhile.

Then something changed. I got beat down so much by the universe’s way of telling me to stop f’ing around, that I got fed up with being fed up. Well, Desi McAdam happens to be one of my favorite people on the planet and a very close friend, and she had always offered to teach me programming…intensively. She and my other longtime friend/ROR evangelist Obie Fernandez had always told me they thought I’d be a great programmer. I didn’t know what they were talking about. So I called up my dear Desi and said “I’ll do whatever it takes. Let’s do this thing.”

I thought I was going to be learning in my off time while still bartending and getting tutored whenever Desi was in town. I knew this would take a very, very, very long time, but I felt ready for the challenge.

As it turned out, she and Obie were down here in Florida on the beach working with this fabulous guy Mark Smith. I had met him some weeks before, and we all had a great time together. They wanted to bring an apprentice on to the small team, so voila! Here I am. I am now in full on training starting with nothing but my instinctual and intellectual abilities and no experience. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity I have, and I intend to give back to Desi and Obie by trying hard to be a bad ass programmer.

Desi is putting alot of effort into being my personal, full-time tutor, and I think she rocks socks for it.

So I’m offering up myself, my victories, and my many future foibles here for your musing and amusement.

Cheers and enjoy

Hi all! My name is Gennipher, I live in Louisiana and currently work as an Oracle DBA and Linux Systems Admin. Scripting comes with the job I suppose. I’d like to get back to some programming so I’ve been playing with PHP and Java mostly as of late. I get giddy when I think about Regular Expressions (I was introduced to them a few months back and we hit it off) so I’d like to learn more about them as well, but that’s something that I will be able to integrate with my day to day job fairly easily. I really want to learn Ruby and Python. When I found devChix, it just seemed like the right online community for me to be a part of and get my feet wet again and reconnect with my inner developer :)

Glad to be a part of a wonderful community!