David Rhoden

Web Design & Development

I started working as a web developer in 2000, when the business itself was pretty new.
I never took a class then; there were no classes to take. I learned everything I learned on the job. I had some native curiosity too, so I kept up.

The business has moved along since then, and it's now mostly about learning whatever tech the bootcamps are teaching, to get hired for whichever flavor-of-the-year technology is on the way out (which means tons of companies are still hiring for it). There are more barriers to entry now, and it seems like the workers are more disposable.

But I'm still doing web development. I mostly work on legacy systems with outdated tech, but it's tech that still works. (A lot of the modern web is overengineered, when it should have just gotten easier.) And I still learn new things. For example, it seems like nobody wants to hire people to manage servers, they just want the developers to do it themselves on Amazon's cloud. So I'm learning how to use Docker and work in virtual environments. So web development is still a good job, if you understand that the lifecycle is so short that whatever you make will be gone as soon as you turn around.

I used to have something of a portfolio page here, but hardly any of what I had to show is still active after twenty years, maybe none of it. And I've been looking at it too long. You can look at it on The Wayback Machine, at least until that shuts down and disappears.

I'm now fully freelance. I currently do business under the name Happening Interactive LLC. My current web development site and limited portfolio is https://happeninginteractive.com.