I always like other people’s story on how they started with webdevelopment. I’ve recounted mine often enough, so I thought, let’s jot it down.
I first came into contact with HTML in 2000, when CU2 became popular in the Netherlands. I was still in primary school. It gave you a personal landing page and a lot of control over the look of the page and what displayed on it. It was the wild west of HTML customisation, with GIF counters showing you how many people visited your page and all that 90’s goodness. I got good at styling the pages and was asked to help classmates with their pages.
The interest stayed, and eventually I was making websites from scratch. I can’t remember how exactly I managed, but there was a way for me to host one website on a free .dk domain. In the early zeros, I made quite a few websites on this domain. Mainly websites for MapleStory — the mmorpg I was playing at the time. It was still the time of tables and inline CSS, and I wrote it all in Notepad. I loved how HTML and CSS enabled me to build something. I kept self-learning by finding resources online.
The interest blossomed in secondary school with IT classes. At that time, Macromedia Flash (later Adobe Flash) was hot and happening. I must have designed 20 different versions of a personal website in Flash, but none ever saw the light of day.
I was 15 when I knew what school I wanted to go to next. I had found an education in line with my interests. With the level I did in secondary school, I could go to Research University, where they offered IT courses, but those were very technical, teaching back-end related programming languages. It was too technical for me. I loved the creative part — what I didn’t know was called “front-end”. So I wound up going to a University of Applied Sciences at age 18, where I studied Communication and Multimedia Design. I got programming classes and learned to work with Adobe’s software. I had drawing classes, and I did a minor in art history and another in 3D modelling. But they also had classes in what they called “Interaction Design”, but what I would have called “User Experience Design”. That particular direction definitely piqued my interest, and I started learning about more than what they could teach me at school by reading a lot of articles and blog posts.
My first real job after school was heavily UX related, but lasted less than 4 weeks due to a terrible boss creating a toxic work atmosphere. I ran screaming. But it turned out to be a great choice. I ended up working at this awesome little studio, where I could work on websites for a few restaurants, a major Michelin star chef, and other interesting projects. It was a fun small team that gave me a lot of responsibilities and valued my input. I eventually went on to a different company, my current company, where the role is a lot more technical. I wouldn’t call it webdevelopment anymore, even though I’m building in the browser — I’m now doing proper front-end development. But still, at its core, it feels the same as when I was tweaking CU2 pages in Notepad: shaping something out of nothing and watching it come to life.