This page is about me. Not you, but me. I.
The Essentials
- Name : Vidyut Luther
- Location: San Antonio, TX
- Age: 27
- SSN#: 123-56-4789
- ABA#: 005871234596 (in case you need to send me money from nigeria)
- Email: vid @ phpcult.com
What I do (Who I’m Eeel)
If you don’t get the joke above, I suggest finding the song “Rubberband Man” by TI. It’s quite amusing.
I’m an independant consultant. I consult on topics like:
- PHP
- Linux
- MySQL
- Apache
- L.A.M.P : I’m a recruiter whore…
- System Architecture
I don’t claim to be an uber programmer, I’m good at what I do, but I do believe I can be replaced quite easily if I get sloppy or full of myself. My talent is not in programming, but rather understanding the problem, and coming up with a solution for it. On top of that, I can talk to non technical people, better than my technically superior colleagues can. If you want an alpha geek, I’m not your man. If you want a well rounded seat warmer (physically and mentally) I am.
The Boring Stuff (History/Why people pay me)
I’ve been working in the IT field since I was 18. I started out a local ISP called Internet 4 U. This was when the elite few had 28.8 modems, dialed in and then used trumpet WinSock to establish a TCP/IP connection and surf the whirrled wide web. If you have no idea what I’m talking about.. you’re very young. At that point, I thought I wanted to be a sysadmin. So, I was a Very Junior Sysadmin for the company, I made $8/hr. I was the epitome of decadence.
At IFU, I was under the guidance of a senior admin named Uriah. I don’t know what his last name was, but he was brilliant. Uriah, if you’re reading this.. thanks, I learnt a lot from you.
At IFU, I was given the task of creating a shopping cart for a customer/friend of the owner. So, for the same $8/hr, Uriah told me about MySQL, not YourSQL, but MySQL. I bought a book on SQL, and started learning the whole RDBMS thing, and why databases are needed etc. Long story short, 1 month after being given the task, the shopping cart was ready, if you think about it now, it sucked. But, for my first project, I was very proud of it. It’s also the thing that got me into programming. Perl that is.
I left IFU eventually (6 months?), and got a job as an Jr. ASP programmer, keep in mind, this was in 1998, the height of the dot com boom. All you needed to show were your typing skill and you were in. I had never worked on NT 4.0 prior to that job, I had some NT 3.51 experience, but really, I didn’t know what NT stood for, I had never used MS Visual Studio, nor did I know of SQL Server. I learnt all of that, but I think my employer knew, I was not happy there. There was just something about the whole Windows platform that bugged me, I had been using Linux personally since 1996 and I had been loving it. I longed to go back to Linux. At this ASP job, I found PHP as I was bored out of my mind and read slashdot like nobodys business. My Slashdot user id is 4 digits long.. kinda like some people’s ICQ.
So, anyway, after a few months of the ASP thing, I was let go. I think my browsing hotjobs.com at work had something to do with it :).
So, mid 1998, I went to a company that did PHP, MySQL and some perl. I was in heaven. I’ve been at a variation of such a company since then. I’ve had many mentors who have taken me under their wings, I’ve learnt a lot from them, and I continue to do so.
My current consulting gig requires me to work on PHP 4 and MySQL 4.0, so on my own, I’ve been doing PHP 5, and MySQL 5. This site is PHP 5.1, and MySQL 5.0, along with Apache 2.2.
I try to stay abreast of technology and the industry, just to know what’s out there.
The purpose of this blog is to let me experiment with the new tech, and to throw zany ideas out there. Sometimes, I use it as my pulpit to preach to the seven people who visit this site.
Currently, I’m interested in Mobile communications. SMS, SMS Gateways, Text Messaging etc.
