I worked for 8 years in the IT industry.

Well, immediately, people think I did a lot of programming.

Actually, no! All I did was handle tools for Data warehousing / Analytics projects – mostly Informatica, Business Objects Data Services, Web Intelligence, Cognos BI, SAP BI, etc.

While I did learn databases out of interest to do my job well and could handle complex stuff (rather, give me anything with databases and I could get it going), when it comes to programming in languages such as PHP or Python, am just a novice. All the stuff I learnt in college is long forgotten.

Now, I find it extremely annoying to be limited by not knowing good programming. I am tired of reverse engineering and applying patches to stuff. Yes, I could hire people and get things going. But, I enjoy programming and would love to be able to build things that I need.

So, here I am learning PHP and a simple, lightweight framework called CodeIgniter. Now, the code at rentals.tapprs.com is maintained by me (Asok built it for us). Slowly, I have started getting a hang of a MVC framework and seem to get better every time I try to add more functionality to our backend. I am also just about beginning to start learning another framework called Laravel, which is a bit more comprehensive.

I realize there are a lot of people like me.

To expedite my learning, am thinking of creating a small learning group consisting of entrepreneurs or wanna-be entrepreneurs who want to get good at coding. 

In the next few months, I intend to

• improve my server side programming (PHP) quite a bit
• get more comfortable with a MVC framework like Laravel (already using Codeigniter)
• improve my CSS/HTML/Javascript to handle the frontend
• build a web application from scratch

If you are interested in joining a peer-program-and-learn group, do let me know.

That said, if you are a total newbie or someone who is not too keen on being a programmer, it might not be good for both of us. If you know some stuff and want to improve, just leave a comment below and we could get in touch. It could be even better if you are an entrepreneur or a wannabe entrepreneur.