Hi. I’m Chris Herdt.<\/p>\n
I am a web developer by trade, but that was not my intention.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Then the world-wide web appeared, and I was fascinated.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Update:<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n Update, v2:<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading About<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3161,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions\/3161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}