Based out of the UK I started dabbling with PHP about 20 years ago. I’ve been in & out of it a couple of times since then, but generally, my day job limited the time I had.
I have always had a passion for programming/coding and am now in a position to start thinking about taking it up as more than just as a passing hobby.
The hardest decision was which language to go with, there are so many out there. To help me, I kind of had to sit and think about my ultimate goal, which is really to build web applications (possibly as full stack). I could therefore think of no other language that is better designed for the web. I therefore decided to go down the route of PHP / MySQL / HTML / CSS(Bootstrap) / JS / AJAX.
I’m a bit old skool in that I prefer to write my code from the ground up, meaning I don’t use frameworks. I am sure they are useful for humungous, apps that need significant scaleability, but I’m looking to deliver more niche, smaller scale apps/sites to people.