As I started to go into in my previous (read: first) post, I worked for an ecommerce site, primarily being 'the fraud guy'. This started to bleed into me playing in the database (to the chagrin of our analytics team lead - who constantly referred to it as 'going rouge'), trying to hunt down patterns I was seeing in fraud-land and attempting to stop more and more.

I've always kind of learned things by doing. In my teen years, I was messing around with Xanga, LiveJournal and MySpace, creating custom CSS and injecting extremely simple JavaScript into my pages and my friends paging, so we could have 'the coolest theme ever'. Looking back, it was silly, but it taught me a lot of stuff. Learning CSS back then meant that I did better when it came time to learn HTML, which I did because I was making a website for a friend. Then I made my own site a few years back, to host my photography. Originally, it was very simple - just a top navigation bar, a simple 'about me' page, and an off-the-shelf free gallery slider in JavaScript. Eventually that escalated into using PHP includes to do menus and such.

How did this help me learn MySQL, though?

In reality, I'm not sure it did. My previous experience did help me, however, to get a handle on the thought of coding as a language. They say that, while learning languages, you have different roledexs of words - the one you are learning and the one you are used to. Switching back and forth can hinder it.

Because I was used to coding in some form, I was able to understand some of the most important things: how to problem solve, and how to Google things for answers.

I started with simple stuff, like SELECT * FROM table WHERE ordernumber = 123456 Slowly, I figured out how to be more restrictive, how to do counts, etc. This lead me to get poached into a different team - and where I am now.

Where is this going?

I want to use this blog to go through my own learning process, and after that, I'll start sharing more specific things about what I'm working on. Upcoming posts include: * How I learned some of the more advanced SQL that I now know * How I spend so much of my time rewriting SQL queries, either because they are wrong or extremely slow * How I thought myself Perl in a weekend * How I knew PHP even though I didn't know PHP * Working on code games as a learning tool, and my favorite learning tools I've played with * Personal projects - this blog, the Fest website I made a while ago from the ground up, etc

I'll probably think of more, but for now, this is what to expect. The next posts after this will continue to have increasingly more code and links to exciting things.