How I became a web developer
I made my first website at the age of 14.
Back then, I felt that the world needed to know about the team we had just formed. After all, we were going to revolutionize the software industry with our own software and games. Or at least, thatās what we thought. Being young and naive, we believed that it didnāt matter that we had just learned to program, spent most of our time in school or playing video games, and knew absolutely no one with any experience whatsoever. We had a dream, and so we began chasing it.
By that time, the World Wide Web had already become ubiquitous. And since it felt like every cool and noteworthy company had a website, we thought we needed one too!
I was genuinely interested in web development, so I immediately volunteered to build our website. I didnāt know a single thing about web development, but that didnāt bother me at all. I trusted that, given enough time, I could learn what I needed.
To my amazement, it was incredibly easy to get started, to pick up steam, and to build just what I wanted.
I began by learning just enough HTML to put something on the screen. I didnāt like the way it looked, so I mixed in bits of CSS until things looked the way I wanted.
I now had a static website, but I wanted to add a few dynamic features: a guestbook, a way to sign up for a newsletter, and a password-protected area.
A bit of research revealed that I had to learn three additional languages: PHP and SQL for the dynamic bits, JavaScript to spice things up a bit. Luckily, I didnāt have to master any of them, a small subset of each of these languages was enough for my needs.
Once the site was appeared to be working, it was time to make it available on the internet. All that it took was an account with one of the many free web hosting providers and an FTP client.
Et voila ā our site was live!
Sadly, I can no longer find the source code of that website ā it probably got lost when I migrated my data from Windows to Linux (or when I migrated from Linux to MacOS).
The only thing I was able to find is an old screenshot, depicting the āabout usā page.
The first time I looked at that screenshot, I was stunned! That website certainly looked a lot worse than I remembered: crappy textures everywhere, low contrast between text and background, and the most arbitrary spacing between all the elements. The only thing worse than that design was the cringeworthy content. Judging from the text, I was the most arrogant teenager that ever existed.
But the second time I looked at that screenshot, I started to feel proud of what I had accomplished.
Yes, it was ugly. Yes, it probably didnāt work across all the browsers. And yes, it probably had lots of security holes and didnāt scale beyond five concurrent users.
But it was functional: you could open the page in any browser, navigate around, log into the password protected section, or leave a message in the guestbook.
And considering that no one but ourselves (and perhaps our parents) looked at that website, that was more than enough.
Iām still amazed by what I was able to accomplish back then.
I mean, I was only 14 years old, had just learned how to program, and didnāt know anyone with any experience whatsoever. So how did I manage to make so much progress on our website?
The answer can be summarized in a single sentence: the web was a truly remarkable development environment.
For starters, the web offered so much content about web development. Furthermore, it was easy to find great material for study, and a lot of it was completely free. If you got stuck, there was a whole community of developers willing to help you in forums. This made learning so much easier.
Next, you didnāt need to pay for any expensive licenses. All the software that you needed was free: a browser, a text editor, an FTP client, some web hosting ā that was it. This mattered a lot to someone like me (a kid without an income).
On top of that, the feedback loop was very short. Changes to the design could be made with a single reload. Changes to the dynamic features only required an FTP upload. As a result, experimentation became something you did all the time.
Last, but not least, you could tap into a vast pool of open source software. Finding just the right library or framework could save you hundreds of hours of time āĀ a great boost to productivity.
All these factors turned the web into an environment in which experimentation, learning, and productivity came easily.
Without those, I would never have managed to make a website ā and my career as a software engineer might never have started.