My Developer Journey Part 2: First Web Page

I started creating websites before I even had an internet connection at home. It was 2003 and I was online when I went to internet cafes or to the company where my father worked.

My father is also a programmer who mainly focuses on databases and at that time mostly on Microsoft Visual FoxPro. Once when he came home from work, he brought me a small package of CDs containing Microsoft Office 2000 and among other things like Microsoft FrontPage 2000.

When I installed Microsoft Word, one day as I typed some text, my father showed me a feature that intrigued me immensely. It was the hyperlinking of two different documents. When I saw this, I knew that I wanted to create a webpage in Microsoft Word at all costs because, at that time, I still knew nothing about creating web pages.

Later, I found out that Microsoft FrontPage was more suitable for creating web pages, so I started creating my first websites about computer games, but they were, of course, offline since I only had limited access to the internet at that time.

I was learning the first HTML tags and trying to understand how web pages work and how I could publish them online. It was very challenging and exhausting for me because I couldn’t look up information on Google or Stack Overflow. I had many unsuccessful attempts, but eventually, I also had some successful ones.

When I had finished my personal page, I tried to put it somewhere on the Internet. Since I didn’t have a burning drive at the time, I used about two or three 3.5-inch floppy disks, where I saved my index.htm together with some primitive graphics.

I created the first website in Microsoft Front Page and published it on the Internet in 2003.

The Internet connection at that time was very unstable and slow, so it took a long time to upload a site to one of the free hostings.

When I got home, I visited an Internet cafe because I wanted to make sure that I could actually see my website from another computer. When I finally managed to load it I was very glad and knew that this is what I want to do.