Welcome

I recently read an article where somebody wondered where they could get the experience that would enable their programming career to take off. They were widely panned in the forum by other users but I thought it was a perfectly reasonable question. I remember thinking the same thing when in the final stages of Uni, "everybody wants people with experience but nobody is willing to give you a chance to get experience".

Inspite of this, I have been lucky and landed on my feet in the perfect job where I get paid to do what I love and work with some awesome people. I relayed my thoughts to a colleague (who I shall refer to as Grandmaster G) who said that when hiring its easier look at people have 1) contributed to open source software and 2) have a blog that he could read to learn more about them.

While I'm not looking to work anywhere else I thought it would be good to share some of my experiences as I learn more about the art of programming. I intend to keep it up to date with my development experiences and hopefully others will find it interesting as well.