I've been around computers since, well, literally forever, playing around on my dad's Timex Sinclair making letters appear on the screen when I was 3. Not exactly a BASIC prodigy, but still. I was building my own 4x86 and then upgrading to glory with a 5x86 K6-II, and then finally my first Pentium, 166 MHz. It had MCC!
I was first introduced to HTML in a roundabout way in 6th grade when my parents took me to a series of courses for "precocious" youngsters. The first was a "game design and development" class, which started with Maxis's Klik & Play game builder, but devolved pretty quickly into playing around in the map editor of Rise of the Triad, which was still pretty cool. Later that year, I ended up taking the HTML class and that was a relevation: here was a language that a sixth grader could easily wrap his head around, and build things in notepad and immediately see the output. There was this amazing book called HTML 3.2 Visual Quickstart. Each double-page spread included an explainer on the relevant HTML tag, examples of the various attributes you could use, and then on the right side, a screenshot of the code in context, AND a screenshot of the finished product. It was a pretty great way of learning what the things actually do, from a book.
I ended up building my first websites from that book and that course. My uncle ran a hosting business and got me my own vanity domain name at 13. This would've been '97 or '98, so perhaps obviously, no one else in 7th grade had their own actual website. (To say nothing of hosting somewhere to FTP things to.) I did what any kid back then did: view source of the likes of microsoft.com, and then heavily modify _their_ site to my own purposes. Oh, and add a bad MIDI clip of "Walkin' on the Sun" by Smash Mouth because, yeah.
I ended up advertising my "services" as a website designer, which was very edgy at that time. Even landed a few clients through friends of my parents. In high school, I built a blogging engine and invited my friends to contribute, and then added on a chat room, chat bot, comments, and what I swear has to be one of the first examples of a true live blog, which I cobbled together with my Nokia 3390 Gold, which featured an AIM client, and a listener plugin in Trillian on my home computer that would fire a... whatever we called webhooks back then, oh, just a GET request, to my server, which would append the content to my running blog.
Ended up meeting a friend of a friend who knew more PHP than I in college, and him and I went into business together. That was 18 years ago. Today, we're still partners in a 60-person custom dev shop. Absolutely wild how those things work, sometimes.
I've been around computers since, well, literally forever, playing around on my dad's Timex Sinclair making letters appear on the screen when I was 3. Not exactly a BASIC prodigy, but still. I was building my own 4x86 and then upgrading to glory with a 5x86 K6-II, and then finally my first Pentium, 166 MHz. It had MCC!
I was first introduced to HTML in a roundabout way in 6th grade when my parents took me to a series of courses for "precocious" youngsters. The first was a "game design and development" class, which started with Maxis's Klik & Play game builder, but devolved pretty quickly into playing around in the map editor of Rise of the Triad, which was still pretty cool. Later that year, I ended up taking the HTML class and that was a relevation: here was a language that a sixth grader could easily wrap his head around, and build things in notepad and immediately see the output. There was this amazing book called HTML 3.2 Visual Quickstart. Each double-page spread included an explainer on the relevant HTML tag, examples of the various attributes you could use, and then on the right side, a screenshot of the code in context, AND a screenshot of the finished product. It was a pretty great way of learning what the things actually do, from a book.
I ended up building my first websites from that book and that course. My uncle ran a hosting business and got me my own vanity domain name at 13. This would've been '97 or '98, so perhaps obviously, no one else in 7th grade had their own actual website. (To say nothing of hosting somewhere to FTP things to.) I did what any kid back then did: view source of the likes of microsoft.com, and then heavily modify _their_ site to my own purposes. Oh, and add a bad MIDI clip of "Walkin' on the Sun" by Smash Mouth because, yeah.
I ended up advertising my "services" as a website designer, which was very edgy at that time. Even landed a few clients through friends of my parents. In high school, I built a blogging engine and invited my friends to contribute, and then added on a chat room, chat bot, comments, and what I swear has to be one of the first examples of a true live blog, which I cobbled together with my Nokia 3390 Gold, which featured an AIM client, and a listener plugin in Trillian on my home computer that would fire a... whatever we called webhooks back then, oh, just a GET request, to my server, which would append the content to my running blog.
Ended up meeting a friend of a friend who knew more PHP than I in college, and him and I went into business together. That was 18 years ago. Today, we're still partners in a 60-person custom dev shop. Absolutely wild how those things work, sometimes.