-Throughout my career I've straddled the divide between system administration and programming. My first few jobs were all related to maintaining various sorts of computers: desktop PCs, UNIX-based machines, and backing up the occasional VAX machine. It wasn't until folks needed websites and realized I knew how to program that my career slid over into programming. From there I learned Perl, SQL, databases, and HTML. At that time the web was new so we were all learning at the same time. I leveraged my Perl knowledge into several jobs doing web-based programming. Perl is a language that is both simple and complex. Perl and CGI made it incredibly easy to get something displayed to a web page. Where it is complex is the syntax for things like regular expressions, and the tendency for Perl programmers to value code that does multiple things on the same line. There was also a lot of value placed on code that was clever, which lead me to wonder on several occasions if I was clever enough to be a Perl programmer.
+Throughout my career I've straddled the divide between system administration and programming. My first jobs tasked me with maintaining various sorts of computers: desktop PCs, UNIX-based machines, and backing up the occasional VAX machine. It wasn't until one of my positions needed a website that my career started adding more programming to my resume. Programming websites taught me Perl, SQL, databases, and HTML. The web was so new that folks on our projects were all learning at the same time. I leveraged my Perl knowledge into several jobs doing web-based programming. Perl is a language that was easy to learn but could become very complex. Perl and CGI made it easy to get something onto a web page. Where Perl becomes complex is the syntax for things like regular expressions, and the tendency for Perl programmers to value code that does multiple actions on the same line. The Perl community also valued code that was clever, which lead me to wonder on several occasions if I was clever enough to be a Perl programmer.