Nearly thirty years
What close to three decades of building for the web has taught me, and what I still don't know.
I first got online in 1998. I built my first webpage shortly after. I’ve been doing this ever since.
That’s close to thirty years. I’m entirely self-taught. No degree, no bootcamp — just a Frankenstein computer, a browser, and a habit of right-clicking View Source that never went away. At some point the question of whether you’ve “made it” gets replaced by the question of what you’re doing with the time. I’m still working on the answer.
What I know
The fundamentals don’t expire. HTML, CSS, JavaScript — not the frameworks, the actual platform — is more stable than it looks from the outside. Every few years something changes enough to matter. But the core model: documents, boxes, events, the paint cycle — I’ve needed that knowledge every year of my career. The same year I learned it.
Being self-taught means the gaps in your knowledge have your name on them. It also means every piece of understanding you have, you earned by doing. That trade-off has been worth it.
The soft stuff compounds. Communication, taste, the ability to disagree productively, knowing when to push back and when to let go — these are the things that make a long career different from a short one repeated many times.
Simplicity is a practice, not a state. Every system tends toward complexity over time. Working against that tendency is a deliberate, ongoing act. The developers I most admire are the ones who notice when something is more complicated than it needs to be, and do something about it.
What I don’t know
Whether the way I work now will still make sense in ten more years. The tools are changing faster than at any point in my career, and I’m less confident than I used to be that I can project forward clearly.
Whether I’ve found the right balance between craft and output. I care a lot about the quality of what I ship. There are weeks where that care is an asset and weeks where it slows me down past the point of usefulness.
How to fully relax about the things I don’t know. I’ve made peace with imposter syndrome but I haven’t made peace with uncertainty. That’s probably next.
What I’d tell myself in 1998
That Frankenstein computer is going to lead somewhere you can’t imagine yet.
Keep going.