Man's just trying to get good at computer over here, get me?

From an early age someone - might have been man, might have been man's parents - decided that man was no use with technology and never would be. But after several failed attempts at cracking the language biz - translation, TEFL, you name it, man bodged it - I found myself stuck in a comfortably dull and underpaid rut, updating web content and helping run corporate events for a small publishing company for the better part of my twenties.

I can't lie, the black tie dinners were good. I even got my own cheese board sometimes.

But man (in the general sense) cannot live off cheese boards alone, and midway through the pandemic a combination of wage stagnation, boredom and the worst, most shoddily built CMS in Christendom drove me to snap and make what I thought was a fairly reasonable proposal to my employer: in exchange for training in the dark art of web development, I would bring our systems and websites up to date and make everything run a lot more smoothly for colleagues and clients alike. I wouldn't even demand a payrise at first - in fact, if I did a good enough job of it, I might even make myself redundant as there would be no need for a glorified admin assistant whose sole USP was having been around long enough to know how to vault the systems' myriad usability hurdles.

Them In Charge accepted the proposal, and then appeared to promptly forget about me completely.

Sensing that I was essentially on a (badly) paid holiday, I splashed out on a coding course, and not long after that I was offered my first junior developer job.

I accepted, to the (frankly astounding, given how patient I'd been with them) bafflement of my previous employer, and for almost a year I was coding, learning, merrily churning out a website a week for various legal firms and commercial construction companies this tiny agency had on its books.

Unfortunately, I wasn't quite able to simultaneously learn and code fast enough, and after ten months found myself back at square one.

This apparent setback, however, has given me the advantage of having time to bone up on my coding skills and think more carefully about my next move. And that's where Mister Internet Dot Biz comes into it.

I needed somewhere to gather my thoughts about coding and keep a written record of coding exercises I've attempted, found puzzling or genuinely enjoyed tackling. And, as a bonus, somewhere to show recruiters that I can, in fact, knock together a "web-site", or "on-Line space", without the whole thing going kaput the moment you resize your browser window.

Stay tuned, and one of these days you might just see Mr Internet pull some magic from his hat.