About

Hi. I’m Chris Herdt.

I am a web developer by trade, but that was not my intention.

I studied computer programming in high-level languages like BASIC, FORTRAN, and Pascal in the 80s and early 90s. The programming style was procedural, at best. At the university, I found the computer science department to be very much at odds with a liberal arts education, and I decided to study English literature.

Then the world-wide web appeared, and I was fascinated.

Now I develop primarily in ColdFusion and C# with a hefty dose of Javascript. I have played around with Java, Scala, Perl, PHP, Python, C, and C++. I have worked either as a lone coder or as part of a small development team, usually in higher education settings.

I know I’m not the only web developer from a non-CS background. I’m in a continual process of discovery about things like design patterns, object-oriented programming, version control, and unit testing. I hope to share some of my discoveries here. Some early posts were contributed by my friend and colleague, Harry Pottash.

Some of my web development interests include: usability, accessibility, security, standards, identifying best practices, and generally finding ways to write and organize code so that the next developer down the line doesn’t curse my name the way I curse the developers who preceded me.

Update: in the time since I started this site in 2008, I decided to go back to school and complete a master’s degree in Computer and Information Technology at the University of Pennsylvania. You could say I am now an intentional developer, but I’ll keep the site title, as the path was still unexpected.

Update, v2: in the meantime, I’ve become a Linux systems administrator, a DevOps engineer, an advocate of The Cloud, a security analyst, and a cybersecurity instructor. I’ll continue to hang on to the Accidental Developer title.