Being Mr. Kenny

Here I use the word ‘programming’ loosely. I am a hobbyist web developer, who is pretty good at XHTML and CSS (or I was the last time I checked, which hasn’t been for a while) and not too bad at PHP with MySQL. I have to look up the odd, rarely ever used, obscure MySQL command, like INSERT or UPDATE, and every now and again I find myself researching the date() function, but I can do quite a bit with PHP. Classes and objects are still beyond me, yet I can use other people’s classes in my own scripts.

After I finished my degree I went travelling, and on my return to the UK I took up wasting my life as a full-time occupation: beforehand I had only been doing it part-time — what with my being a student. I did the odd bit of temp work (cleaning for the council, sitting at a computer for a day in my sister’s school, data entry for a mental health trust) but largely I spent my time getting up late, watching Star Trek: Voyager, walking the dog and, most productively, working on various web development projects.

It was during this time that I picked up my web skills, and really developed them. After I moved back to Sheffield in August 2006, I got a job working in a restaurant. It left my days free to do with as I pleased, and I spent most of them working on a plugin for WordPress that will allow me to manage all my photos from the same admin interface I use to manage my posts. I’m still working on it, over a year later…

I now work at Church (Hope City Church, Sheffield) in the conferencing department. The hours are long, and I also serve on the production team where I work on stage lighting, meaning the hours really are long. We often have things on in the evening, and there are events on both Saturday and Sunday. I don’t quite work a seven day week, but it does feel like it sometimes.

But I really love programming. I love seeing bits of code, and I just think monospace fonts are really pretty. I love the way everything is so neat and orderly, and how things always end with my most favourite punctuation mark, the semi-colon. It reminds me that code is a strange mix of language and mathematics.

Writing code is like setting up dominoes: each statement flows into the next one and the end point is totally different from the start point. The only difference is that you don’t have to set the dominoes back up again afterwards.

This post has been a retrospective of one of the best year of my life so far. Thank you for joining me on the journey. I am now going to eat vegetable samosas.