Back in 1995, I got my first taste of web development, putting together a few pages of simple HTML for a piece of university coursework. It was a small part of my course, which was a mixture of software engineering and communication studies—an unusual mixture. I learned the fundamentals of software development, database design, and programming. But I also learned about the importance of the audience and end user and how to communicate with them, both verbally and nonverbally.
In 1998, on the communication-studies side of the degree, I was required to write a publication for an organization of my choice. I decided to write a prospectus for the school where my mother was teaching at the time. But I decided to do it as a website. Again, this was all front-end work. Fortunately, I no longer have a copy of it, as I shudder at the thought of the code. We’re talking HTML with frames, table layouts, inline styles, and a smattering of basic JavaScript. By today’s standards, it was shocking, but back then it was quite futuristic. I was the first person at the university to submit a website as a publication. I even had to tell my instructors how to open it in their browsers from the floppy disk it was submitted on! After it was completed and marked, I sold the website to the school it featured. I figured there was probably a future in this web development thing.