My developer story
Like many young kids in the early 00s, I learnt to code using Myspace. Neopets (and even more so Geocities) was a thing before my internet access time, and when I did go on it I was playing all the arcade games not coding. On Myspace there was a hack where you could overwrite the normal Myspace page by forcing the html element to close, simply just a </html> tag, and from there you could completely design and build anything on a clean page, much like you have today on Neocities. Here, I learnt the basics of HTML and CSS, tinkering for hours. I would get home from school before anyone else, I'd plug in the modem to my dad's laptop and tinker away until I heard him coming home.
As well as coding, Myspace was a place where you would take emo/scene selfies and give yourself a name with an alliterative phobia. You could join 'whore trains', where you posted a bulletin with all the other people also in the train and you'd add everyone and collect friend requests, a little bit like Webring. I've tried to find my page on Wayback Machine, but to no avail.. probably for the best.
A few years later, Bebo was all the rage. Not as coding-focused but there was still a way to make your own graphics and themes, which I did extensively until Tumblr was launched. Tumblr quickly became my new coding playground, learning to use the templating system and the API to create an ever-evolving theme.
At this time I was focusing on studying, passing my exams and learning to be a human. I still coded into the night but it was just a hobby alongside playing World of Warcraft, underage house parties and working for some money. With the money from my job, I saved up to buy a MacBook so I could code on my own computer.
When school finished, I had good qualifications in my pocket but no idea what to do with my life. I was working 30 hours a week in a grocery store, collecting savings hoping that one day an idea would pop into my head for a career. Luckily that day did come. A chance chat with someone who was working overtime during my shift, I mentioned that I loved coding and they told me that they had a friend with a web design business. They put me in touch, and I became an intern at this business. This was my fork in the road and I sometimes wonder what would have happened if that discussion never happened. In many ways, it changed my life.
After a year of interning, my boss encouraged me to go to university and learn this stuff officially. This definitely isn't a requirement for getting into web development, especially now, but it helped me focus my path and take my hobby seriously as well as all the other soft skills you get from getting a degree.
At university, I already knew a lot of what they were teaching, so I spent most of my time teaching my peers and helping them with assignments - partly because I enjoyed it, partly because I was procrastinating doing my own. In my second year, I became a paid peer-assisted learning leader for the first-year students who enrolled and I loved it. My course covered lots of different technologies, web development, graphic design, game design (I learnt how to write a teleportation function in C# and used it to create a ton of mini-games), and the ethics of technology. I left university with a First and 3 years' worth of Dean's awards of excellence. This feels very horn-tooty but if I can't write that here where can I!?
After a stint working for a one-man band, I returned to where I did my internship as a junior web designer. Here I met my partner (now fiancé 💍) who had joined the company since I left for university (see what I mean about it being life-changing?). He taught me so much more than university did, I learnt about git versioning and Bootstrap and CSS preprocessors. After a while, he wanted to stretch his wings, so moved on to work in a local university IT team, inspired, I also looked for jobs there and found a User Experience Designer role in a different department.
Working in the public sector has different priorities than private. Work is slower and more intentional, pushing a single change would take weeks or even months of discovery and review. There is a budget for user testing and doing things properly. My time in this role coincided with UK law changes for the public sector regarding web accessibility. Having a fairly strong moral compass and seeing a knowledge gap, I took it upon myself to attend accessibility workshops and learn about the web content accessibility guidelines. This was the beginning of my expertise, and while no longer in the public sector, I am still the champion of accessibility in my current role in a private sector agency.
My passion lies in writing semantic, inclusive code; using HTML correctly and not reinventing the wheel where possible; keeping projects as small as I can to reduce our impact on the environment; and being an accessibility consultant, writing reports on accessibility issues. In my current role as a Frontend (it's one word, fight me) Developer, I sit as the glue between the Design team and the Backend Developer team. Working in an agency is fast and intense and I can touch upon 20 different clients and projects in a single week. I don't have as much time to pour (kinda a pun) into accessibility workshop attendance as I used to (I've reduced it to a single monthly meet up with the international Champions of Accessibility Network) and sometimes I burn out too much to even look at a screen after work hours, but I learn quickly and have grown exponentially as a developer in such a fast-paced environment.
One day, I hope to work in the public sector again, or for a not-for-profit, as this aligns with my life goals and aforementioned compass, but getting to work on such a myriad of clients on a daily basis is fulfilling. No day is the same.
I started this Neocities website in April 2023, after a colleague showed me Localghost's website, which is also hosted on Neocities. Since joining, I have found so much energy in this community, amateurs and seasoned developers alike. Even after a day of burning the candle at both ends, logging into Neocities and seeing everyone's fervour for web development, at whatever point along their journey they are at, has been a source of joy and motivation to me. Going back to the basics of HTML and CSS (no preprocessing) has taught me things I didn't know I was missing.
This is my developer story, and it is not over. It is something that will constantly evolve, chapters will always end and new ones will always begin. This industry never stops moving and you have to keep up. I have been in the industry for 8 years, plus my 3 years at university, and there is so much I still don't know yet.