Keep Pace

Nearly all the knowledge and skills I use at work as a web developer were self taught. When I was first starting out, that described anyone in the industry I had met. I believe that while we all came from different backgrounds, I think were were all attracted by the same couple things.

One: Web development isn’t prescribed. While there’s hundreds of thousands of us in the world, most of us are finding our own way to solve the same set of problems. It’s unlikely two developers within the same company will arrive at the same solutions, let alone develops from different companies, using different platforms, frameworks, or languages.

Two: Web development is fast. You can create something in a matter of minutes, and make it look good enough in a matter of hours. I can’t think of any other profession that let’s you create things you can share or sell so quickly.

The first web project I was paid for was in 2007. It was adding some simple JavaScript/jQuery to sort a table of alerts the support department at work used. There were no web developers in that office. I found jQuery, made up the code, and solved a real world problem in less than a day.

I wonder how many industries are as self taught, let alone able to yield results so quickly. Often I feel like we’re just all betting we can learn things faster than the requirements can come in.

Ten years later, that drive to try something new, make it up as I go, and solve problems is still powerful. I temper how much of the new stuff end up in production, but part of what attracted me to this industry is how it re-invents itself in so few years. You have to want to learn, every day, just to keep up with the web.

I wouldn’t want it any other way.