Hi
Every PHP developer or any other server side developer has a story about how he started. So, why don’t we share out stories here? 
Cheers
Well, I am a late comer to PHP and my motivation for learning it was to customise wordpress.
Prior to that I did mainly python/Django web work and before that Ruby on Rails.
Lately I am doing some PHP/Wordpress for some small companies in the small town I live.
Lately also trying to understand SEO but that seems to be a very incomprehensible field, especially when it comes to improving Google page rank.
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I started by building a website to show off photos of my grandchildren. As the number of pages grew, I was changing the menu on every page, and looked for a better way.
Someone told me about PHP includes, and since that time, I have used PHP for every site I build or work on. I now have several Sitepoint books and I have dabbled in MySql.
Since I was young I somehow intuitively understood that being computer literate is invaluable skill in today’s world. So even though I was planning to study marketing, I started coding on my spare time. Eventually, this necessity to gain some computing skills grew into something larger and I started building small websites for myself, friends or doing small projects for others. Then I switched my degree from marketing to Computer Science. Now I think I outgrew PHP since it is quite a basic language and am slowly starting to learn Javascript and C to be able to build applications in the future
However, I don’t think I will be coding forever since I don’t feel extremely passionate about it. What motivates me the most is the end product. If I had budget, I would probably pay others to do my projects.
I decided when I was young that I don’t want to work a job where I could get crushed by falling objects or anything hazardous at that sort, but at the same time, I still wanted to make decent money. And to my luck, computer programming fit that description, which was something I already had exposure to at a very young age already. So as time went by, I just delved further and further into that sort of world (doing both web development and desktop software development) and eventually ended up doing what I do today.
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