From Health Care Assistant to a career in IT in a year.

This is my first ever blog post. A year ago I had no idea what a blog was (other than a vague notion of people writing stuff). This blog is the story of an accidental career.

It all started last October (2007) when my wife launched her own business Jackie Brown Medical Ltd. She is a recruiter par excellence but we were a bit lacking in the technical department. I undertook the challenge of creating her website.

It should be noted that I had absolutely no knowledge or experience. The first thing I did was go and buy a copy of 'building a website for dummies'. The only dummy was me for buying the thing in the first place. It is already about 10 years out of date. It did however teach me some very basic html.

I have discovered that there is plenty of information on the web for those who look for it. A few sites spring to mind as being particularly useful to a beginner. The first is www.tizag.com for excellent tutorials.

Since I needed to make job pages for the site I also had to get to grips with mysql and php. I cannot recommend phpfreaks enough! It is a forum full of really helpful people who know just about everything to do with building websites.

To cut a long story short I got so interested in the web and coding that I changed my preferences for a college place this year from nursing to computer science in DIT. I couldn't believe it when I got in! I start next Monday. Four years full time. I can't wait. I'll probably be the oldest student in the year but I feel like I've won the lottery.