Why I Work on the Web — A Résumé Prologue

I’ve loved the web for a long time. It has enabled so much, even in its very earliest days, from making information sharing easier, to communicating and connecting with others, propelling commerce, and democratizing opportunity and access. Nearly everything we’re experiencing online now, the good in particular, felt inevitable back then in large part because we saw previews of today in the failed startup attempts of yesteryear.

Social networking and communities such as forums and BBSes were alive and well on the web in the 90s. There were startups like PayMyBills.com, a 3rd-party internet bill paying service that launched in 1999. Companies like Webvan offered online grocery delivery back in 1998 and streaming audio products like RealAudio Player were a thing as early as 1995. Though most of them ultimately failed, they were still great, and to be a part of where we were all heading was exciting to me from an early age.

Chat Rooms

I was around 16 years old when I got online for the first time. Internet service providers like Compuserve were offering free trials and my parents signed up although at first, none of us really knew what to do. Imagine having no concept of websites, or even the internet, and seeing something like this pop up on your computer screen.

Somehow, I found my way to community chat rooms called CB Chat. Hundreds of strangers, chatting away in one of many rooms, having conversations about anything under the sun, and I was immediately hooked. These chat rooms were incredibly engaging, and it was cool that you could just connect with any number of people, on virtually any topic, at any time you wanted. But ultimately, it seemed more like a form of entertainment. It wasn’t until discovering the open web, that the real, practical value of the internet would become palpable.

The Open Web

W-w-w, dot, u-c-s-c, dot, e-d-u. Those were the first letters I would type into a web browser. It is the domain address for the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), one of twelve colleges that I would apply to. We were living overseas at the time, so I wasn’t able to physically explore all of the universities on my short list. But UCSC had a website where I could learn about their course offerings and campus culture. It was incredible! I could see photos of their classrooms, buildings, and surrounding areas. The amount of information felt, and was, infinitely larger than what was in their brochures, but also fresh and current. And best of all, as with CB Chat, I could access the information that was relevant to me and do so at my convenience. In the end, and I’m sure it was just a coincidence, I picked UC Santa Cruz and off to California I went.

Learning to Code

Technically, my first “real” job was working at the on-campus computer lab during my freshman year. I helped students get online and taught them how to use Microsoft Word and Excel. A guy in my dorm, Tim, a computer science major, also worked there, and he knew how to build webpages. We struck up a friendship and he taught me the basics of hand-coding HTML, how to create images in Adobe Photoshop, and about FTP clients like WS-FTP for uploading files to a webserver. By my junior year, I could visualize a basic webpage in my mind and build it without needing any help or referencing my books. I’d had enough knowledge to land a paid internship with a software company in San Jose called Cadence Design Systems, where I spent the summer building and maintaining an intranet site for their toy lab.

The toy lab at Cadence was cool. It was a small conference room, complete with couches, refreshments, and stocked with all sorts of consumer technology products. Employees at the company could come in, play around with all the various tech, and check them out in the way you would a book at a library. My job was to create an internal website for the toy lab, so that employees could see what kind of toys were in there, whether they had been checked out, and if so, by whom and for how long. None of this was database-driven of course, there weren’t even any forms. It was just me manually updating the pages. Even still, it was purposeful. I had real users. They found my toy lab website helpful (though let’s be honest, probably cute). And I found it awesome. But it only made me want to build something bigger, for real users, with actual practical value, and something that the world could see.

The First Real Job

During my senior year, I enrolled in a course that I think was called “Introduction to Business Systems”. The professor was an ex-IBM, ex-Anderson Consulting old school type that pronounced “window” as “win-duh”. I’d regularly go to his office hours and blabber on about the web. With graduation around the corner, he told me that his niece was the head of HR at a Silicon Valley startup and that he could talk to her about getting me a job there. Naturally, I took him up on the offer, interviewed with their internal recruiter, and just a couple of weeks before my final college exam, accepted a full-time role with iPrint.com as a Web Producer. I was offered a $45,000 salary, $1,000 signing bonus, 5,000 stock options, and the kicker? I could wear shorts to the office too.

iPrint.com offered online printing services through its nationwide network of digitally-enabled printers. Through the website, you could create a simple design, pay, and get it printed on products like business cards, coffee mugs, and t-shirts and have it delivered to your door. My job there was to take a design file, build it in HTML, and hand it off to backend developers who would integrate it with the database to make it dynamic. The work was intense and constant, and there were a lot of 3am nights, but it felt worth it. At the time, it was estimated that Silicon Valley was creating 64 new millionaires every day, and there was no reason to think we were an exception. But the industry’s growth-at-all-costs obsession would eventually (and rapidly) hit a breaking point, and only 10 months after joining the company, iPrint, like so many other dot-coms, laid off nearly their entire staff before getting delisted from the NASDAQ a few months later.

Conclusion

Where this story ends is where my resumé begins. On there, you will notice that I’ve only ever worked on the web. And outside of a few, fleeting moments where I wanted to sell it all and live on an island, I’ve never wanted to do anything else. In spite of working in an era now where the web is viewed more transactionally than ever, my north star has remained the same as always. And that is to help users find useful information and present it in a meaningful way. It’s a simple, fundamental heuristic that I believe applies to every website, including sites made for ecommerce, content, software and yeah, toy labs too.