My life as a coder began as a nipper typing BASIC computer programmes from magazines into the family ZX Spectrum (after we upgraded from a ZX80) and later a Commodore 64. The great thing about this was that not only would you have a game to play, but you could have a go figuring out how it worked
In 1994 I began learning HTML, launching the first version of this site courtesy of an account on GREX. Soon after I started to get to grips with Perl (and even some Pascal).
Some years after that I got into Java, and I am now lucky enough get paid to write in it (and even a bit of Perl). One of these days I'll get off my arse and finally learn Ruby.
My first large scale Java project was a set of web applications to support the online booking and managing of hotels over the internet, while I worked for In1solutions (formerly Allied Management Systems IRL) in Dublin. These included an inventory management system called IMC (In1 Management Console), a JSP booking system for customers, an application to provide connectivity to external GDSs for the PlanetIn1 website. In1Solutions continue to go on to great things expanding into Spain and New Zealand and I wish them nothing but the best of luck.
Most of my Java written in the last few years has been for my current employers. For them I've been working with teams to produce booking engines, intranet applications, extranet applications and all sorts of other things making extensive use of the SOA philosophy. My current role is to assist in the creation and development of a new Pan-European car hire platform for the company.
In the mid 1990s I started dabbling with Perl, usually looking at other people's code and picking it apart to see how it worked. By 2000 I was coding in Perl commercially, writing CMSs, shopping carts etc... However It's always been in commercial second place (translation: Java pays more) even though I find it great fun.
My first commercially written Perl application was a products database for The National Chemical Company of Ireland, while I worked for Precise Communications, a dot-com that unfortunately (for them) went bust soon afterward. Please do not draw too much of a connection between these two events. Apparently the database software is still in use as part of the NCC site, currently being maintained by Australian firm Netset.
Another popular commercial Perl application I wrote was something called Axiweb Lite which was a content management system I wrote for In1Solutions. It featured a rich text editor and was suitable for use without a database (it used a pipe delimited file to hold all it's content data). At the height of it's popularity it was on 15 - 20 sites, and is still in use by several to this day. It's Lite, by the way, as it was based on another CMS produced by the same company which was written in ASP and called Axiweb
These days I write a lot of Perl for fun, a small recent project was to screenscrape the TFL website for live travel information, more detail about this is on my Tube RSS Feed page. I'm also working on an application to build some menus for Freevo, based on links scraped from streaming audio and video providers.
Recently I've found myself going off PHP. It is pretty good for churning out something quickly, but to be honest it's not great to maintain. Well, maybe my PHP is not great to maintain.
A few years back I wrote some bespoke PHP message board/forum software which I named Enrage. This was primarily intended for my public transport site BUSRAGE, which still runs the only copy of it. I originally intended to clean it up, comment it and release it as a piece of open source software people could use on their own sites. These days, however, there is better written and better supported software available for running forums and much more. In fact my intention is to replace the use of Enrage on the BUSRAGE site with some third party PHP board, as soon as I see one that fits the bill. I may, of course still release Enrage for the hell of it, who knows.
Still running on this site is Celltrack PHP my PHP app to track where my phone is. The phone software is the (apparently now defunct) dot-net based Celltrack application, which talks to a Celltrack Database. My PHP page talks to this database over XML and stores the locations, times and other data in a mySql database on this server before spitting it back out onto the page as a Google Map. My php page was originally based on a google maps mashup written by James Lee Saunders, but I have extensivly re-written it and added database support. Just like everything else, when I can be bothered I'll put the source code online (but if dot-net Celltrack is being sold to some commercial firm I may never be bothered).