Since an early age, I’ve been interested in four things: design, architecture, coding, and the band Roxette. These subjects influenced how I spent my free time, what I studied, and ultimately pursued professionally.
During the latter years of primary school, I attended an after-school extracurricular centre once a week where we were taught everything from sketching with pencils and graphite to basic computer programming with Logo and advanced chemistry.
These extra skills inspired me to do everything from creating sketched inserts for my taped copies of friends’ CDs to coding a catalogue application for my vast (I thought) comic book collection in Clarion. During high school, I learned Pascal, and learnt about DTP while working on the school newspaper and yearbook.
Initially, I pursued a creative career studying Electronic Origination and completing my design and layout apprenticeship. At the same time, the Internet became a thing, and I started tinkering with HTML and CSS.
My first “real” job allowed me to design websites, where I had a quick fling with ASP before discovering PHP. After the initial spaghetti code, there was the Zend toolkit, CodeIgniter, FuelPHP, Kohana, CakePHP, and Laravel. I used Laravel almost exclusively between 2012 and 2019, in-between trying life as a Ruby on Rails developer for around three years. Since then, I’ve mostly used “vanilla” PHP at work, with a detour of some C# and the first bits of tinkering with TypeScript. In my free time it’s still mostly Laravel with some 11ty thrown in for good measure.
During this developer phase of my career, I still find time for some traditional design – a logo, a poster or a book cover now and again. And then, of course, there were the fonts, icons and GUI themes: some good, some bad, but all period-appropriate.