[marklit]

The author of this probably grew up in an environment simular to mine in the 1990s. Among my peers and teachers, everything revolved around Microsoft. C$650 for Visual Basic Pro, Windows NT was the special platform that business used, 'real' databases cost a lot of money.

I really wish I could go back to those times and give the open source world more thought and attention. Free compilers, free databases and looking back at it, PERL would have been a lot more useful than Visual Basic.

I spent years developing OpenGL applications on WindowsNT. I wasn't very good at what I did and the market for my skills wasn't very broad.

Had I built a basic web app using HTML, Postgres and PERL I could have avoided a lot of time spent in jobs I did not enjoy very much.

In the summer of 2002 I was trying to focus on building my skills in C++ and OpenGL to a commercial-ready level. As a fun side project I built a mock airline ticket booking system in PHP. The side project got my a job in Germany and the rest is history.

Some languages and tools are more marketable than others.