I started out my development career writing awful procedural PHP, like many many developers before me. It’s such a forgiving language, and while I don’t resent it as it got me through a lot, it probably wasn’t the best first language to learn.
My three years of "learning the hard way" has made me into a much better PHP developer. As has going back and rewriting one of the first web applications I wrote. Painful!
I’ve thrown these together because that’s how I learnt them – to compliment my back-end web development experience, I learnt how to make things look good too.
Full disclosure – I’m no designer, and most of my web applications have needed the touch of a proper designer.
I’ve been writing embedded applications for around a year now – I’ve still got a lot to learn, and the constraints take a bit of getting used to.