I’ve been building websites for over fifteen years. Twenty-five if you count the rudimentary attempt at inserting hyperlinks in Word documents when I was in grade school. Back then, I didn’t really understand how links (or websites for that matter) were made, but I thought I was cool just for making blue underlined text that opened Internet Explorer. (I also thought I was ahead of the curve using Windows’ Briefcase folders to sync files onto a floppy disk like I had somewhere to be. I’m pretty sure the disk just ended up in the back of one of those floppy organizers.)
The first web-accessible site that I published was a project for my first CS college class. It was a very simple, hand-coded static site built purely with HTML and CSS. It was very fast, rather ugly, and hardly more useful than the marked-up Word documents of my childhood, but I was amazed that in a few hours I could combine the right words and symbols in a text editor to bring that website to life. It felt like magic.
Since then I’ve developed many dozens, probably even hundreds of websites and applications. I’ve used a dizzying array of CMSes, languages, frameworks and libraries to create increasingly advanced revenue machines and polished user experiences. I’ve worked on many enjoyable projects, and quite a few frustrating ones.
Yet, here I am having come full circle. The site where this blog lives is also a static one, probably the first I’ve created in over ten years. There’s no web application behind it handling events, no database to store content. Sure, it’s much more complex than a few pages of hand-written markup. But it’s interesting to me how, so many years later, something so relatively simple can elicit a level of joy similar to what I experienced from those first few keystrokes long ago.
I’m entering the 14th year of my career, and it looks very different from what I expected when I first started. I don’t know what 2023 will find me doing, but I hope that it comes with more of the same kind of joy that creating this site has, both for me and for the people that I help.