Requiem for the “Front Ender”

I first used a computer in 1997. I was 16.

I grew up quite poor. My tiny grade school didn’t have computers. We didn’t have a computer at home. I wrote papers on my mother’s college typewriter.

In 1997 I bargained away the labor of a youthful summer for a computer. I bought it at Radio Shack. A Radio Shack in those days was still a magical place where old men rummaged through bins of something-metal, smiling fondly. It lived at the “old mall”, a place 18 miles distant from our one continually blinking, yellow traffic light.

At another store (near the “new mall”) I bought a copies of Netscape Navigator and Metrowerks’s CodeWarrior for $39.00 and $89.00 respectively. In those days we paid for software.

These were fantastic sums.

C++ is not a language that engenders a love for programming.

Looking in the mirror there is a scar only I get to see. It comes from a wound, terribly deep, cut by Not-Good-Enough. It’s mostly faded now, but I cannot hide from it. This is a badge from the most important lesson any programmer learns: it will never be easy. You will reach new heights, but the climb will never grow easy. The peak is never in view.

I feel stupid every day, but I’ve armored myself well.

In Netscape Navigator you could “view source.”

I had two sites on GeoCities, both in Area51. One was about table-top role playing games. The other about Star Wars. Doomed, even then.

In 1999 I wrote a small application with PHP and MySQL using DreamWeaver, FTP, and the client’s hosting service. I made $500.00. Drupal was two years away. Wordpress, four.

In 2003 I helped manage a large site. Standardistas roamed the internet like Cuban revolutionaries preaching the power of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Gone were the spacer gifs. So, too, passed the table layout, the font tag. Everything I knew was swept away, replaced. I know the pain of starting over.

Viva la Revolución.

Prototype. Rails. So many grid Systems. jQuery. MooTools. Sliding doors CSS. Merb. Django. Java (never again). Project Builder.

Dojo, YUI, Cappuccino, and SproutCore.

My god, the iPhone. Android. Node. Go. Ember.js. Angular. React. A few robots. The Chrome debugger. Swift.

It’s 2015.

You can still view source, but nothing you see has plain meaning.

I know how to read the tea leaves. If I were 16 again, wounded, and here: where would I turn? If I were 30 and here, unwounded but unarmored, how would I continue?

The apocalypse looms, but for others. I am not there, that is not my world, but I know well the pain of of starting over.