I find myself somewhat fascinated that as of today, I’ve been involved professionally in the web industry for fifteen years.
Back then, in 1995, I lived in the country, and while I had a 28k modem, the distance from the house to anything resembling good copper wiring meant I was lucky to get 14k speeds. Usually around 11k.
Not that that stopped me. No, not at all. I had spent voracious amounts of time on the ‘net, mostly using what I remember being Mosaic Netscape, though it was around then that it changed to Netscape Navigator (first 0.98b, then the amazingly stable version 1.1).
I spent most of my time online learning how to create web pages, learning what was, at the time, a very new idea and concept to me – HTML.
I just finished studying design in school, and my first son was a fresh little baby, and I was slaving away on my 68LC040 and 4MB RAM equipped Macintosh Centris 610 (running System 7.1), and saw some great potential for this web thing to change the way design worked.
And as everyone knows, I was right. Fifteen years later, that initial study of HTML has led me on a long, wonderful and interesting career in the web field, first as a designer, then (when Javascript first made it’s appearance) as a designer/developer, then in 1999 or so, to become a standards-compliant front-end web developer, and eventually to my current position as Director of Web Development at one of Canada’s largest media companies.
I’d like to thank everyone who’s ever had a hand in my career, from those who create the systems on which this wonderful Internet runs, to the guy who first hired me to be a web designer to my current development team – surely the best group of developers I’ve ever had the privilege to work with.