About Me
Drew C. King
I’m the tech support manager for Consolidated MLS, the multiple listing service in Columbia, SC. I’m also a part-time web developer…and no, I will not build a real estate web site for you. Most of my non-working time is spent with my incredible wife and my three awesome kids, but in the wee hours of the morning when I’m fueled up on coffee, I’ll treat myself to some one-on-one time with my computer and the various extracurricular projects I’m involved in. I’m such a dork.
I <3 LAMP
Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP; These are my weapons of choice when it comes to developing web applications. My experience ranges from ASP.NET and classic ASP to some rudimentary Java, but I can’t seem to tear myself away from PHP. Its simplicity, both in terms of the language and the platform’s shared-nothing architecture, is what makes it so interesting to work with. The language itself still needs a great deal of improvement (Screw prefixing all my class names, I want some namespaces!), but the PHP core developers do a very good job of progressing quickly enough to keep me from becoming dissatisfied.
PHP Development…by example?
I’ve written a lot of PHP code over the past 7 years, but there’s not much of it that makes me very proud…rushed implementations primarily. Failure is a great teacher, as most programmers know, and I’ve learned many valuable lessons from all those mistakes and embarassingly clunky designs. I’m just glad nobody’s life was depending on the quality of my code at the time. I’ve improved my skillset dramatically over the past few years, but I am by no means a web ninja. My goals with this blog are simply to:
- Provide interested developers a step-by-step description of some of the things I’ve built.
- Help less experienced developers benefit from my failures by reading about them.
- Archive my past failures and the successes they inspired, so I don’t forget.
- Ignite some discussion so that I can (hopefully) dodge as many upcoming failures as possible.
- Force some accountability onto myself so that I will complete the various open-source projects I “work on” from time to time.