About

My name is Bigi Lui. This is a Web Dev blog, and I’m a web developer; so I’ll give you a quick history of myself as one. (improving credibility, right?)

I have actually started at this web development thing quite a long time ago. It was around 1999. (How else would I be able to secure a 4-letter dot-com domain name? All of them were taken by 2000.) At that time, I was 15 years old. I started Agum Network, a free service that provides tools for webmasters. That was the time when I first really started doing web development (as opposed to, simply writing HTML for a personal homepage, which I sure did back then!). I developed all the CGI scripts used in that service in Perl. It includes a guestbook service, a visitor tracker, a form mailer, and a few more others. During this time, I had also helped with various friends’ and acquaintances’ web products. If you run a check on me on Google with my name, you might find some; such as Locked-Area.

The type of webmaster services that Agum Network was seemed to be fairly popular at that time, as I had quite a few competitors: BraveNet, ByteCenter, CgiForMe, etc. Not many of those survived through the years. Honestly, it wasn’t a very profitable business. For myself, the only profit came from the sales of some Perl scripts I had written as products.

After I closed the Agum Network service in 2001, I haven’t been nearly as active in the web development scene. I still kept myself updated with web technologies — just to be aware of what’s possible nowadays; as well as helping with some friends’ web sites.

I had been working mostly as an old-fashioned programmer, coding C++ and such, for the next few years. On the side, I’ve been picking up new skills myself on web development, like PHP, MySQL (the whole LAMP stack), as well as more front-end things like CSS and DOM scripting. I had created some web apps that I’m fairly proud of during these years, such as the first web-based file manager that had semi-AJAX interaction — before “AJAX” was even coin-ed! In my application, I made the whole UI as interactive as possible utilizing the latest CSS and DOM scripting techniques — the only thing I was missing was xmlHttpRequest, so page refreshes were still needed. This was back in 2002-03.

There came a time around 2005-06 when AJAX first exploded. Google came out with Google Maps, Gmail; and things like Meebo became a possibility. This was when the whole Web 2.0 hype got out. (It is true that the term “Web 2.0″ already existed before, used for describing the new generation web sites that are people-based, such as Wikipedia, Friendster, MySpace, etc. However, the “real” Web 2.0 happened when web applications became as interactive as desktop applications, with the power of AJAX.) At that point, I knew that in 2006, there would be another boom like the dot-com boom in 2000. As I had guessed, countless new “Web 2.0 companies” materialized and jobs are suddenly everywhere.

I’ve been keeping myself updated with what’s happening and what’s being made possible regularly, but I haven’t had the time to really learn everything in detail — thanks to being an employee at Intel. Unfortunately, my job in there had nothing to do with web development and the only thing I got to do every day was C++ coding.

Recently, I left my job at Intel and got back to the wonderful world of web development. I’m currently working on a project (a fairly big one at that!), which is really brushing me up on every aspect that I intend to get better at.

I know there are many “hobbyist web developer” out there, just like how I was the past few years — and many of you don’t have time to learn all the great details in web development, even if you have a general idea of what’s going on. I write in this blog some of the really useful things I’ve been picking up lately about web development, and hope to clear things up or give you something new to learn as you read. They are things that I found interesting or important, and I hope you will too!

May 2007

It’s been a while since I wrote the above introduction! To make some corrections/updates about the above, I had actually taken on a new job since June 2007 and had been working as a full time web application developer since then. But that doesn’t change what I do with this blog. In contrary, it actually gives me more ideas for topics to write in this blog — and more advanced topics at that, too.

And as a little background on what I’m doing currently — the small web development firm I have joined had been doing consulting work for clients, building web applications. Until about 3-4 months ago, we have moved on from clients work and are in the progress of building our own startup company. So in short, I work in a small team in a pre-funding stage web 2.0 startup now, and do all sorts of work from Ruby on Rails coding, frontend development in Ajax, JavaScript, CSS, to even project management and some product design work.

Just for the record, I still consider PHP my web development weapon-of-choice; even though I don’t get to use it daily now. If you like my PHP articles, do not be disappointed, for I will keep them coming.

March 2008