I know Pascal since 1995 and up to its Delphi 7 dialect. Maintaining and heavily augmenting Mansion of Celebs (celebrity picture board) since 2010 and thus I know phpBB3.0.x inside out, resulting in knowing PHP up to 7.2, XHTML and CSS3. I avoid frameworks for their added complexity and getting dependant on them, so I'm able to write code (Pascal, PHP, XHTML, CSS and most notably JS) in the most reliable and readible way. As a side effect I'm also fond of regular expressions, text encodings (i.e. UTF) and the Win32 API.

Solving problems mostly comes down at misunderstood or inexistent basics:

• Want to download via code without knowing how HTTP works? After I grasped how methods, status codes, headers and encodings work I was also able to achieve everything else, like writing mass down- and uploaders which are able to cope with unsuccessful cases.
• Want to extract file information without knowing file structures? After starting to read documentations about file formats I was able to parse them, then even deal with corrupt data. Now I can spot dozens of formats by looking at the binary data and extract whatever I want, no matter how recursively containers are stored (i.e. XMP in ID3 in MP3 in MKV).
• Want to find duplicates without having an idea how? My learning curve led me thru hashing file contents to recognizing file contents and ignoring its metadata (i.e. audio files ignoring their tags) or hashing the rendered data (i.e. picture bitmaps from either JPEG or PNG or GIF).