In my old dog, new tricks post, I mentioned that, though I used to blog, what you're reading now represents my first use of Wordpress. Was it hard to set up? No. It doesn't hurt that I have a computer science background, including an undergrad degree in the field. Of course, when I was in college, web development was not part of the required CS curriculum. Standalone apps were still dominant, so I learned Java and then C# .NET, which I used to write black box trading systems for a couple years. During that time, I also took my first writing classes, and once I realized that software engineering was not going to be my career, I left that job and went to grad school for writing for a couple of years.
Post-grad school, I got into communications/marketing as my day job, and of course those fields are now entwined with web development, as websites/email/social media/etc have become the dominant tools for organizations to get their messages out. So I find myself in the nexus of computers and communications, which, considering my background, seems like a natural place for me to be.
In my current job, I maintain a relatively simple site, using Dreamweaver to write the standards-compliant XHTML and occasional JavaScript that the site uses. But I want to develop and hone my skills, and starting a WordPress blog to play around with is a step in that direction. I've already customized the theme and poked around in the templates, and I'll be doing some more of that. My long-term plan is to learn Django and to write my own--wait for it--applications. Yes, back to application programming. But a different kind from what I learned back then, and one I'm really excited to get into.