Web Development (The Learning Days)

In my last post, I shared my school days’ moments with you. Continuing from there, I’ll share my next step in life i.e. career in web development.

After my high school got over, I had two months of holidays because generally colleges starts in mid of June (and all my all exams were over by April). So I started going to my uncle’s office. Zanetine was started by my uncle, Gurinder Singh, which later went on to collaborate with Navdeep Singh. I joined Zanetine as a junior team member, and now we were a team of three members.

I didn’t really have any knowledge about web development stuff when I joined Zanetine. I was just eager to learn programming and I was so much addicted to computers. At that time, I used to have a computer with 128 MB RAM, 1200 MHz processor and ~40 GB HDD.

I still remember my first day at Zanetine. My uncle didn’t teach me HTML tags, CSS, etc. He rather taught me about standards, semantics, quality, and web accessibility. I think I can’t will never be able to forget that 45 minutes session with my uncle. I have really learnt a lot from him.

So it was going great. I used to spend most of my time reading eBooks and working on small tasks. At that time, AJAX, Web 2.0, and even IE7 were new things I remember I once got a very exciting assignment from my uncle – It was “Designing and Developing a Webpage for CSSZengarden”.

Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, I used to learn photoshop from online tutorials (PSD Tuts). Every Saturday was reserved for learning designing while other days were for development. During those days, I used to think that I design quite cool stuff, but now when I look at them, they look so funny. At that time I used to think, I designed very cool stuff, but those look funny now.

And about CSSZengarden, I must say this that assignment assignement has really taught me a semantic way of writing html, browser compatibility issues, and standards, etc. I remember at that time I once developed a webpage there, which was supported in IE5.5 as well. Alas, CSSZengarden was not accepting entries any more then. So it turned out to be more of a was just a practice exercise.

I, thereafter, joined TSGGS Khalsa College and got admission into Bachelors of Computer Applications. Well, our universities really have really very old syllabus, and our education system is not very good. Students run for grades and positions, but they don’t have practical knowledge. I hardly worried about marks, position, or grades. I just cared about practical knowledge, skills & programming. Hence, I ended up spending spent most of my time at Zanetine office.

I didn’t spend much time at college as much as I would spend spent at Zanetine office. Awesome days!!

At Zanetine, I joined as a junior team member. And slowly I started developing nice skills in HTML, CSS, JS, etc., and started working on live projects. I remember, the day when I got my first live project and communicated with a client. I would get got nightmare of complaints/issue raised by my client. lol. I believe I was doing things in a correct way (fixing ugly html code in wysiwyg editors), but the client would want wanted things to be done in really quick. And this  was the thing that eventually taught So this thing taught me about the deadlines, the communication with clients, and the main thing “A client is always right”.