Growing Up HTML

I instantly identified with Matthew Haughey’s recent post, Ten Years, in which he describes the transformative experience of building his first web page.

My first glimpse of the “real” web – that is, outside the walls of AOL, Prodigy, or CompuServe – was pretty early on. I spent much of my youth at American University, where my mother teaches. One afternoon a bored member of the English department office staff showed me this Mosaic thing the tech guys had recently installed on all the computers. “Way better than Gopher, but there isn’t much to see yet.” No matter. I soaked it up. I looked at just about everything there was to see on that infant web.

It wasn’t until a couple years later that we had an ISP at home that offered free web space for their customers. I built my first home page, complete with hit counter. From there I tried to start a Mac news site and, competition shaming my amateur attempt, subsequently refined my focus to Java on the Mac platform, then a hip topic. My sites looked awful, but a generous soul working at a Mac-centric web host took it upon himself to hook me up with a copy of Photoshop. I learned. I played with the first crop of WYSIWYG tools and went back to coding by hand. I read Webmonkey religiously. I had stumbled on something preternaturally compelling.

My first internship in web development didn’t technically exist; at age 12 I was too young to be issued a work permit in the District of Columbia. I’m now 22. Ten years. I feel like I grew up building the web, and I guess I did. No surprise, then, that for all my forays into information security and other fields, I always end up doing the web work.

The web’s in my blood, now.