Good morning, folks. Today is May 9 and I am here to introduce myself to you. My name is Mike. I am a 50-year-old front-end developer. For those of you who prefer it you can call me Mikey, or Michael. It makes no difference to me. My brother even calls me Miguel, but enough on that... I chose to call this blog Coder Cafe because I'm addicted to two things, Coffee and Coding.

I've been into coffee since I was a little child. You see, my father would take me to work with him on his big garbage truck and we would go to the local factories and pick up the trash and compact it into his truck. At one factory there was a store and it sold coffee for the workers. Well, being not exactly old enough to really handle the strong taste of coffee, my dad would order a coffee for me that was milk with basically a splash of coffee. So that is basically how it started. 45 years later I'm still drinking coffee, although now it is much, much stronger.

I got into coding almost by accident really. You see, after some challenging health scares in my life, I had to try to figure out what I could do to pass the time and help me support myself. So, at age 35, I decided to go to community college to be what they then called a "Webmaster." The title intrigued me, and I liked computers, so it was a no-brainer. After one semester I was hooked. I was writing JavaScript and PHP and doing things I never thought I could do with a computer. I was mostly making games for children like Rock, Paper, Scissors, and History Quizzers, but it was fun. I even built an online music store with PHP and MySQL on the school's servers. All in all I was having a great time but then another health scare hit.

After the problems with my health were dealt with by the doctors and I was patched up it was clear I wouldn't be able to work in the traditional sense. So I found that I had a lot of time on my hands. I chose to utilize that time building websites. I first built a website for my local church. I't wasn't the greatest site, but it was a good first attempt. It lasted about 3 years before it was updated by the pastor, who was a PHP developer. He helped me with PHP and we worked together on updating the site regularly. Until about 2016 when another health scare derailed me for a bit.

After six months I regained the use of my right side and was able to think more clearly. I used coding as therapy and joined freeCodeCamp and SoloLearn and started to work on my coding chops again. I began just building static sites and working on my HTML 5 and CSS 3 skills. (A lot had changed since the early years when I was using XHTML). In 2018 I began working on another site for the church. The 2010 remodel of the site was in desperate need of an update, so I took it upon myself to do that. After about a year I had built a ten page site that was much more modern in its design flow.

Right after that site was developed I was contacted to build a site for a friend's business so I jumped at the chance. I had been dancing around in the Udemy realm and happened upon a course in Bootstrap 4. I really liked Bootstrap and I found myself using it to do a lot of prototyping. This time, instead of prototyping, I decided to construct the whole site with Bootstrap. It was great, but of course more health scares came my way and a site that should have taken a few month to do right took a whole year.

Since then I have had the opportunity to jump around a bit by taking Udemy courses and learning a little Java, Flutter/Dart, and some Ruby on Rails sing the Learn Enough to Be Dangerous platform by Michael Hartl. That pretty much sums up my coding journey. It's not super exciting, but it has been fun and I look forward to learning more and sharing the knowledge on a regular basis. I encourage you to reach out and jump into the cafe for some healthy conversation about code and maybe even what type of coffee you like.