I seen a reminder that I am coming up on 10 years of professional web development. In some ways it doesn’t seem that long, in others I believe I feel every single minute of those ten years. As I was learning web development though I wanted a project that would help me learn, but also give me an outlet for one of my interests which happened to be cars. With that combination a small site called Lookers Speedshop was born.

The original version of the site, launched in the summer of 2012, had no CMS, it was all static HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I modified a template to fit my need for the site, and worked on it in Adobe Dreamweaver CS4. I would visit people I knew, car shows, and cruise-ins and interview people about their classic car. Each article was it’s own static file, and anytime a new article was written I would have to update the archive page, and home page manually.

At the end of 2012 I started an internship where I was introduced to a number of new technologies. I was able to work on static sites similar to mine, dreamweaver template sites, Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress. It was during this internship I began to build my first WordPress plugin, it’s primary function was to inventory and catalog equipment owned by the company. Since then while I do work with other technologies, I have primarily worked in a WordPress space. After that introduction and first project in WordPress I built a new version of Lookers Speedshop in WordPress that was launched near the end of 2012.

Lookers Speedshop started as a web development proving ground for myself. In 2013 when I was interviewing for my first development job, part of the interview revolved around reviewing the site. I learned some valuable lessons from that site. Sadly I decided it wasn’t something I wanted to devote much time to after a point and I took the site down. It might make a comeback at some point, but for now it’s something I can look back to as a launching point to my career.