Why I love being a Web Developer.- Insight from someone who loves his job

February 8, 2010

Why do I love being a web developer? I’d say this is so mainly because I don’t ever want to be a network administrator again. True Story.

I remember my very first computer job. I had gone to interview for a biology teaching position (B.S. Biology, M.A.T. Biology, CS Minor) at a private school in Alabama. While they didn’t need any other biology teachers at that point they did need a new network administrator as theirs was leaving the following week.

So, for a nice bump in pay and a one way ticket out of my previous job as a lowly production line style chemist to a completely unprepared network administrator I had completely changed career directions in one day. There were dark days ahead. I’ll only tell you one of my many, many stressful stories.

The current network admin had one week to get me up to par. Let me paint the scene. It’s the late 90’s and Windows 98 is just released. The budget that year for the school computers didn’t leave room for software upgrades so I’d have the privilege of working with Windows 95 on a Microsoft environment.

So each night, after a stressful day of trying to connect a client to a server (and I had around 225 computers to set up) and hoping, praying for that magical three-line-login after the reboot to know you had successfully entered what felt like an immense amount of data, I would then go to sleep. And when I would sleep I would dream.

And these dreams were nightmares. In my dreams I could see myself entering in all the IP addresses and server information and etc, etc, etc. This would go on for minutes. Then the familiar reboot and the anticipation and the then, BOOM, the disappointment as a two line login appeared instead of the holy three. I would immediately wake up. It was not uncommon for me to wake up 30 times a night as the dream kept recurring over and over. This went on for my first three months.

So, when I say that I love being a web developer it was through those trials and tribulations as a network administrator. I was wholly unprepared but I faked it long enough until I got my mitts on developing web pages. For a graphic-artist wannabe, it’s a dream come true.

It’s those moments when a design, a cleverly crafted CSS template and all of the browsers show exactly the same thing (yes, even you Internet Explorer 6) and that warm fuzzy feeling that comes over you makes it all worth it. To know that this piece of “art” is about to go live and that the world now has a little piece of you, whether they know it or not. It gives one the of a good days work and…the fact that I’m no longer a network administrator.

And for all those network administrators out there that know what the heck they’re doing. My hat is off to you.

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