I have a passion for web development. This interest started when I was around 16 years old. This was late 90’s, just before the start of Google. I’m feeling old after typing this. 😉 At that time when we had to search for something, AltaVista & Yahoo! were the sites. That all changed not much later when Google became popular.

The internet looked quite different than today. One thing that didn’t change is that people wanted their site to stand out from all the others. Then that was mostly done by displaying animated gifs. The more the better. 😉

I was a fan of The Simpsons so it seemed obvious that this was going to be the subject of my first website. GeoCities provided free webhosting if you didn’t mind some advertisement. Knowledge of HTML was sufficient to get things started. I don’t remember anymore how I learned my first HTML tags. I think I learned the most by looking at the code of other websites and searching online for information as I still do today.

That is in my opinion the biggest achievement of the internet; a source of knowledge that you can easily access. That database of knowledge is only getting bigger. Wikipedia is in that aspect for me a frequently visited site.

Begin 2000’s I started with a new site. This time I opted for a paid Belgian webhost service; PriorWeb. They allowed me to use a backend database (MySQL) and PHP so that I could host a phpBB forum. My site, beside the forum where people could discuss about different topics, had mainly a collection of funny videos, jokes and JavaScript games. The site had an Adobe Flash intro that I created myself. The site went offline after 5 years as I no longer had the time to maintain it.

Years passed by. Professionally I was busy as an IT support agent and later as a data analyst/reporting. For the latter I learned VBA and spent several years intensively programming in MS Office applications.

I didn’t do anything web development related professionally until my company asked me in 2013 to add a new feature to the inhouse created PHP planning tool, available via the internet. The main developer that created the tool no longer worked for the company. It took me some time to go through to the code. Lucky for me it was well written and had comments! I can’t stress enough the importance of comments when writing code. Not only to facilitate others to read your code, but also for yourself when returning to your code after a while.

After a month I created the new features that enabled clients of my consulting company to see the planning without seeing the options normal users saw, like request for holiday, etc. I remained the admin of the tool for a few years until my company decided to go for another solution for the resource & planning management.
But the passion for web development was awakened again in myself and once more I decided in 2015 to create a personal website that is still online today with the purpose to increase my web developer skills. This time I choose for the webhost company Geek Storage. And so this site, jimmybauduin.com, was created.

I built my own PHP framework with an administrator interface to manage the users and pages. For the layout I used Bootstrap, an open source toolkit to build responsive mobile-first projects. Bootstrap, originally named Twitter Blueprint, was developed by Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton at Twitter as a framework to encourage consistency across internal tools. Last year I upgraded my site’s Bootstrap version from 3.x to 4.3.1. Some of the CSS naming changed so it took me a few days to get everything to look ok again.

At the end of 2019 I helped a friend create a website to promote and to provide a place for discussion for a small football team he co-manages. As the idea was that he himself would maintain the content I decided to install WordPress. I first tried Joomla, but I wasn’t a fan of the user interface. This was the first time I used WordPress. It was more work to get the site to look somewhat professional then one would think. Even when there’s no code development involved going through the different themes and plugins with all their options can take some time. Apparently, WordPress’ market share is 34% of all websites. What started as a free web blog software became a full content management system.

I share this passion for web development with my father. He has a website dedicated to postal stamps related to space. He started his site in 1998 and now he’s 77 years old, but still actively maintain his site. His site contains hundreds of pages. I was able to convince him to use PHP for some of his tables so that he could more easily import his Excel sheets in the site’s database and display them in automatically generated tables.

My dream is to be able to do my hobby as a web developer on a professional level. I know I have a long way to go. Times have changed, only knowledge of HTML isn’t sufficient for building a website. I will have to learn one of the front-end frameworks such as Angular or React.