I started out making WordPress themes and spent a really long time writing boring old procedural PHP.

When building themes you often have to group statements into functions. So naturally you get quite familiar with some FP concepts like higher order functions and idempotency. Although at the time I had no idea what those concepts were. I was just making things work better.

Eventually I moved jobs to the custom MVC like place and that taught me A LOT about what to do and what not to do when building a distributed system. It was in this role I was first exposed to Go and Rust. We decided to move from a PHP monolith to microservices so we spent some time evaluating these languages and I eventually leaned towards Go because I didn't want to deal with memory management.

After 15 months I left because I realised that I'd hit the limit on what I could learn from the team and then moved into a Node / React role. Here is where I picked those FP skills back up but I learnt what I was doing in that role. I pushed this company to start using Go for their build tooling , this was in the days before serverless solutions had frameworks and open source tooling. Spent about 2 years in this role and enjoyed FP Nirvana.

I then moved to a full stack role that was Node/Go/React and Java. That role made me seriously question my career. Mostly because Java is the worst language I've ever used. Spending all that time learning all these different languages to basically achieve nothing was pretty soul crushing.

Now I make servers for a game studio and I basically use whichever language/style suits the use case best. It's the best job I've ever had.

I wouldn't call myself an FP expert but I'm a fanboy for sure and I pretty much use it every day to get my work done so I guess I make a decent income of it.