This is my first programming endeavor - a simple meme comic creator inspired by my addiction to a friend's wildly successful site - 9gag.com.<p>More than anything else, as my first project, I learned that I have a LOT more programming to learn. And also, that programming is freaking awesome regardless of my current ineptitude.<p>I built the site using JS/jQuery/HTML/CSS and a dash of PHP (for base64 string to file conversions) and the Bing Image API for image searches (not currently working because Microsoft moved to pay model - boo!) all running on micro Linux instance on AWS.<p>For a few month learning all that stuff from scratch, I'm pretty proud of myself. For my next project, I've been playing with Node.js and MongoDB to try to sort out server-side magic.<p>Anyway, Hacker News has been pretty inspiring for me - I started reading it about 10 months ago just out of curiosity and understood about 1% of what everyone was talking about. Now I understand...10%? That's progress at least, right? :)