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Damian's Success Story from AspFriends.com “From ASP For Dummies to List Leech to Microsoft MVP in No Time.." to discuss this or your experience, please join our [review-help] list from family of review lists)
Damian Barrow <damian@travelcounsellors.com> shares this success story:
Hi all.
I'd like to share my story as I think it shows how anyone, from any career, can move into this field with enough help from a resource like AspFriends.com.
In 1998 I wrote a simple intranet using mainly Frontpage and the MS Access Wizards. At the time I was an English Police Officer, dealing with crime intelligence and drugs information. The intranet enabled me to disseminate my information in a controlled manner to the troops, quickly and efficiently. All went well till I became ambitious and I had to actually learn what all those tags meant and interpret the html generated by the access wizards (!).
I bought ASP For Dummies, read it and decided that the wizards were no good, and that Frontpage was limited as a development tool.
So then I bought Dreamweaver and was forced to learn another scripting language, javascript. Then I had to learn T-SQL. Then I had to learn +Com and IIS and, you get the picture.
The problem I had was that I was very isolated and totally self-taught. I had no peers, no sources of reference other a few books, no real development platform. I didn't even have access to the internet, let alone to a resource like LearnAsp.com. My previous computer experience was a second-hand Commodore Pet when I was 11 (1980) and an Amiga 1200 on which I mainly played games.
Eventually, after 18months of mangling HTML and strangling scripts, I got connected to the internet, albeit only at home and for no more than a few hours each week. I found, by chance, a site called LearnASP run by Charles Carroll. There was an option of downloading all the lessons, a whopping 1.8mb file which became my bible. I took this to work, finally sorted out a lot of my code and, once the project was complete and after much soul searching, decided to leave the Police for a career in computers and the internet.
After 3 weeks of baked beans on toast I started to wonder if I'd made the right decision until I landed a job as the network administrator & junior DBA for a large homeworker based travel company. "Doing the intranet" was also one of my tasks, and I soon found that some of the requests being made, especially ADSI and Exchange stuff, was beyond me. In some areas, waaaaay beyond me.
So, back to Learnasp I went and it was then I discovered the lists at AspFriends.com (back then it was named Asplists.com though). Boom! What a resource. I can't begin to estimate how many hours, days, weeks, the lists saved me & my company, not only in code support but in emotional and personal support also. As I had questions in a lot of area's, I subscribed to nearly all the lists.
I initially (way back in 2000) took a lot of peoples time in the following areas, and was helped by:
Since that time I shifted from questioner to answerer - and at one point I was answering every question I could in order to further hone my skills. Between Feb 2001 and Dec 2001 I answered over 1000 questions which is *still* small payment for the assistance I got in the early days from industry gods. My skills have been honed now, and I feel I can call myself a "proper" administrator and web developer. One major indicator of this is that Charles Carroll nominated me for the Microsoft MVP program for the volume of my answers. I was shocked at the time and humbled by the fact that someone had noticed my contributions back to the asp community. In January 2002, I was awarded the MVP which is a massive award for me. I have no technical training, no certifications other than those I have taught myself (including my MCSE+I) and no physical peers within my company with whom I can share this honour.
I do however have a place I can call mine - albeit a virtual place - and that is at ASPFriends. I love code, I love people who code and I just love "answering them questions". I have made some incredible friends on the lists, notably George Clay, Peter Brunone, David Penton and of course, Charles Carroll. I owe my success to these people and to the people on the lists and for that, I am eternally grateful.
AND... Seeing as I will be porting to .NET any day soon, I will owe these people again in the coming months..!!
I'd like to thank, above all, David L. Penton for his wisdom and sheer mastery of his craft, Charles Carroll for his (believe it or not!) humour, and to Roger Gilbertson, who motivated me in my darkest hours.
Cheers
Damian Barrow, MCSE+I