New section of the blog: AppFog through the eyes of an up-and-coming developer

Greetings, fellow developers!

I’m Luc Perkins, the newest addition to AppFog. Please let me briefly introduce myself. I was born in Soldotna, Alaska but have called the Portland area my home since I was a kid. I studied political philosophy at Reed College and went on to get a Ph.D in it from Duke, finishing this past December. Toward the end of my studies, I began to feel inexorably drawn to the world of web development in general and to the start-up community in my home city in particular. Two months ago, I bit the bullet and dove head-long into programming, hitting every YouTube tutorial that seemed useful (shout out to Bucky from The New Boston in particular), slowly inching through the JavaScript tutorials on CodeAcademy, and even doing it the old-fashioned way and checking out books on PHP and Python from my old alma mater’s library. So far, I’ve mostly accumulated smatterings of knowledge about lots of things (especially acronyms…do you ever stop learning acronyms?!). But suffice it to say that I’m hooked, on the unbelievably broad and active peer communities associated with every language and platform, on the pace of change in the world of development, and on the incredibly inspiring creativity and camaraderie that I see on display everywhere, from start-ups to blogs to the Ruby gem library to the brilliant programmers sitting right across from me.

For all these reasons, I’m absolutely thrilled to be brought on board to occupy the position of Developer Evangelist at AppFog. True, my background in computing is, in a word, limited. While I consider myself generally tech-savvy and have never encountered any serious difficulty doing many of the things that citizens of the 21st century do online, from social media to basic web design, I come to the world of programming and development with both a mountain of curiosity and a limited skill and knowledge set driving me. This space will be devoted to—pardon the kitsch—telling my story, the story of my evolution from a beginner struggling to understand things as simple as the ins and outs of PHP, MySQL, and other languages, to someone who will eventually be able to put AppFog to fruitful use and worthy of the title “Developer.”

Along the way, I will share my impressions of and experiences with existing programs, languages, and platforms, offer advice to up-and-coming developers on the many pitfalls that may confront them in the course of their own development, and attempt to contend with the steady flow of subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle transformations constantly going on within the brave new world of cloud computing. It’s going to be an uneven but exhilarating ride, and I look forward to sharing the journey with you, Dear Reader.

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