About a year ago I decided the internet was the way for me. Though I had spent four years of college dancing around the subjects not altogether unrelated to the web (which further blog posts will discuss) and my entire life from about the age of 12 enjoying working with computers, the web and other media (and there will be some rants about the problems higher education can incur), I had never quite said to myself that I should do “web design.”
The fact that you are reading this post and have come to this site give you the end of the story. At some point I clearly either accepted that web was where my skills fit or rather I embraced the career path and realized it was not only a career but a passion (which is actually the case). Also, as someone who fancies a good story about how we got where we are today, I’d like to take a moment and explain what has happened in the last 365 days of web also known as the last 365 days of my life.
Mind you 365 days is not an exact number, but I think I am close enough to round down (about 3 weeks) to make it a nice round year in my life.
365 days ago I was kid with a Film/English/Art BA from Augsburg College saying to myself: “Now what do I do?” I had worked doing graphics for a small company, I had worked at a health club doing customer service / cleaning duties and I had a terrible economy crashing down around me. I should have convinced myself about three years earlier that I didn’t have the nerve or the desire to pursue a job in Hollywood working my way to the position I would still probably love – editing video; further I planned to try to make a living so that great American novel was not forthcoming in the near future despite my love for writing.
Well, I had to get a job and I had my criteria set: ‘see if I could find something remotely creative in a business setting.’ After searching the best jobs to apply for were in the web field and I decided to give it a shot as I had done some (bad) web work before. I also found out how little I knew. It was at about that time I funneled all of my waking hours into a medium that seemed to give me a fighting chance to survive in life, and my passion bloomed from there. 365 days ago I only knew HTML 4.0 and I was comfortable in the adobe software suite and that was it. I still thought tables were the way to go.
In three weeks I learned tables were dead, there was a thing called web standards and you could make stuff look awesome with CSS. This was both shocking and enlightening news and over those three weeks 2 things happened. I was prepared for my first job which happened to start at the end of that 3 week period and I discovered the new web as I started experiencing it was totally awesome. As an aside, I did have other skills the position required and I did not totally lie my way through the interview process. I simply was met by a team that liked my combination of skills and abilities. It was also an internship so some learning was part of the job.
From there I had a mentor at the internship (and I thing mentor-ship will make an appearance as a later post). Mike pointed me to so many useful resources I had not been aware of until this point. A List Apart, Konigi, UXbooth, Boxes and Arrows, so on and so forth a list of web resources I still keep and maintain. I stuffed my feed reader, aligned my twitter account with web designers and developers and kept reading more books and exploring new technologies.
I have continued learning and practicing my skills working as a Front-end Developer/Designer at Creature Works Labs in Waconia, Minnesota and on my own personal side learning projects.
I have spent countless hours refining my skills working on the web. There have been some distractions here and there, what with a Wedding and a College Graduation also taking place in the last year, not to mention my new apartment, countless visits to my wife in Sioux Falls, SD while she completed her internship and my four nephews, friends, other family so on and so forth I have had a busy year. Next year wont have fewer things going on, but I will continue to spend my free time learning new technologies and now with the blog live, I will begin passing along what I learn and my thoughts on web technologies, theory and emerging trends.
Here’s to more of the web in 2010. Thank you all for your support, I am looking forward to continuing to add to the web community in my second year on the web.