How I got into this
I built a Frankenstein computer from spare parts, got online for the first time, and right-clicked View Source. That was 1998. I never stopped.
I am entirely self-taught. No computer science degree, no bootcamp, no formal training of any kind. What I have is curiosity that started in 1998 and never ran out.
That year I built my first computer from spare parts — a Frankenstein machine cobbled together from whatever I could find and afford. I got it running. I got online. And I had one question: what is this, and how does it work?
The answer, it turned out, was right there in the browser.
View Source
Somebody told me early on that you could see the code behind any webpage. Right-click, View Source. I did it, and what came back was a wall of angle brackets and words I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t immediately obvious. But there was something clarifying about it — the web wasn’t magic. It was text. Structured text that a browser knew how to read.
I started copying what I found. Changing things to see what broke. Reading whatever I could find on early web forums. There were no YouTube tutorials, no coding bootcamps, no Stack Overflow. You learned by doing and by asking strangers on the internet who were patient enough to answer.
I was in my mid-twenties. I had no particular career plan. I just wanted to understand how the thing worked.
What being self-taught means
It means the gaps in your knowledge are yours and yours alone. Nobody handed you a curriculum. Nobody told you what order to learn things in. You found out about the things you found out about, and there are corners of the field you circled for years before someone finally pointed you at them.
It also means every piece of understanding you have, you earned by doing. Not by passing a test. Not by sitting in a classroom. By building something, breaking it, figuring out why, and building it again.
I wouldn’t trade that. The web rewarded curiosity over credentials from the beginning, and I arrived at exactly the right time to benefit from that.
What has stayed the same
The tools have changed completely. The fundamentals haven’t. Structure, presentation, behavior — that separation still holds. Understanding the relationship between them is still the thing that makes someone genuinely good at this.
Everything I’ve learned since 1998 has been in service of getting better at those three things. The frameworks come and go. The underlying model remains.
That Frankenstein computer is long gone. The curiosity that started on it isn’t.