Hi readers! This is my first post, so I promise you I'm going to make this as lively as possible.
Well, I'm not necessarily a computer programmer by profession. I am a medical doctor. If you are wondering why I am writing on a tech blog and making some websites, well, its a long story. It started when I fell in love with typewriters at the age of six.
We used to own an old yellow typewriter. When I was small, I was really fascinated by the noise it makes everytime you touch the keys. It sounded like women walking on high heeled shoes. Thus began my fascination of keyboards that at the age of 7, I was already experimenting on that yellow typewriter. I typed and I typed. And wrote short stories using it on bond paper complete with my own illustrations.
When I was six, I was sent to school in the city. I always loved the countryside where I grew up. I loved the sweet smell of grass, the fresh air, the music of the trees..ahh, everything was perfect then! Maybe I was meant to be a farm girl. But then my parents sent me to the city which enabled me to live in noisy boarding houses as a child.
The city was far a far cry from the countryside where I grew up. So as a child I became very shy and often withdrew from other people. I kept to myself most of the time. During those days, I engrossed myself in reading books. I would read a single book cover to cover in a day. I was fascinated with science books, those that were about scientific discoveries. When I was 9 years old, I was exposed to that bulky computer in the late 1980s where we played wheel of fortune and other games. That computer kept swallowing and vomiting floppy disks, and I learned to format those disks at that age.
Because I was a shy child and kept to myself, I initially joined the art club, then the journalism club. Then I still wrote poems and short stories, some of which were published in our elementary school publication. But then as I approached puberty, I met a lot of friends and I became more outgoing. But I still kept my silence at times.
When I was in high school, I didn't care much about writing and books. I cared much for friends, crushes, the outdoors and even sports. I did not care much about computers nor typewriters.
Things changed when I was in college. Because of financial problems I had to look for a scholarship to sustain my education. My mother was a college teacher then and she taught english.
Once when we had to write an essay, my college professor called my attention. He told me I had a writing talent that he couldn't find with my other classmates. He then suggested that I take the exams for the university publications. And so I went, wrote some articles and did not expect to be called. When the results came, I looked for my name in the staff members list. I did not find my name there. I was about to go sadly with disappointment when I took a look at the editorial positions. I did not expect to find my name as one of the editors.
And so my love with typewriters was rekindled. Back then in 1997, we used to type our articles on that white bulky typewriter. That typewriter was memorable to me. It was in that typewriter when my first boyfriend in college typed his poems of love for me.
We only touched computers when we were in the press. Before going to the printing press, I would buy manila paper and do lay-out on that paper. I would draw with a pentel pen, marking it with lines where the content should flow and where the pictures should go. At the press, there were a lot of computer encoders who typed our already typewritten articles. So what we would do is guide those computer encoders on adobe pagemaker where the content should go. Then, we would print and proofread and print again until the prints are made into blueprints which will be run by machines to make magazines and newspapers.
When we had time, we went to seminars. We were taught how to do photojournalism, copywriting, article writing and editorial writing.
Whenever we had deadlines, we used to stay late up at night writing on the computer, placing graphics, managing the content flow and publishing our outputs. That was the way we did things in the 90s. When I was graduating in college it was year 2000, and it was the start of a new revolution in the Philippines: the internet revolution.
Curious as I was, I approached the computer and typed words on the search engine. It was amazing how HTML files came up so quickly on the screen. When I went to medical school, we would search articles on various diseases. However, I was still looking for ways on how to augment my income while going to medical school.
There was an ad I read. It said they needed writers. It was in the year 2001, more than a decade ago, and I was interested when the ad said it needed article writers. So I applied and they gave me topics to write about. My contact was a lady from a Malaysian company. Then she told me that I need to add keywords to my articles. She taught me how to place those keywords in those articles, how to write titles. I had no idea that what she was teaching me was search engine optimization (SEO). And so began my career as a freelance SEO writer. I would write for a lot of companies abroad; they liked my articles and they paid me through bank transfer.
It was in the year 2007 when I entered Elance. I worked with some clients who taught me a lot about web development, social media marketing and more search engine optimization. I was an interested student and I quickly grasped concepts. I knew about FTP files, working with databases and doing front end web development. I was even designing websites to my utter shock.
I had my residency training in internal medicine and I went to Manila to try my luck. After working for some hospitals, I ended up in a company doing clinical trials. Thus I was exposed to more complicated work such as doing statistical analysis, interpreting clinical trial results, plotting pharmacokinetic graphs, and working on large patient databases. After three years of working in Manila, I decided to settle down back to Iloilo City and become a freelance writer.
While working as a freelance writer, I worked with some web development companies and gathered some concepts. So I tried to learn these concepts and with the help of books I studied programming and markup languages. I felt it was necessary to start a web development team that caters to medical companies because medicine has some very complicated needs that laymen cannot fulfill alone. These needs can only be fulfilled by another doctor who is still practicing medicine, just like what I am.
Well, that is my story. I hope you won't get tired of my rants and raves here. I will try to write here even though I am very busy. Thanks for reading my litany and God Bless!
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