My Web Development Journey

I started writing HTML in the late 90s — pre-CSS, just a kid trying to figure out how the Interwebs worked. Resources were thin. The few books that existed required a long drive to get my hands on, so I leaned on whatever HTML training sites the early web had to offer and shipped the most basic pages I could imagine.

Fast-forward to 2022. I'm deep into web3, but my day job leans more toward project and program management than hands-on engineering. I'm not in the trenches the way I was as a Linux engineer.

I have an idea: start a crypto security company. But I can't just jump straight into Solidity for Ethereum — I need to work backwards. The right starting point matters.

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are the foundation. From there, blockchain fundamentals and an object-oriented language like C++. Then Solidity on top.

Figuring out where to start was the hardest part. I eventually pulled together a curriculum that would have taken a year or two through traditional channels and cost tens of thousands of dollars. I found a focused stack of high-quality courses for under $250 total — well worth the investment.

The story of web development is inseparable from the story of the internet itself — the web (short for "World Wide Web") is a massive network of interconnected documents and resources accessed over that internet.

The recognizable shape of the modern internet traces back to the 1960s, when the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) built ARPANET to connect researchers across universities and research institutions. By the 1970s, the network had expanded beyond research and opened up to commercial use.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee — a computer scientist at CERN — proposed a new way to organize and access information across the internet. He called it the "World Wide Web" and built the first browser and server software himself.

Early on, the web was primitive and mostly used for sharing scientific and research material. The 1990s changed that fast. The web exploded outward as people found new uses for it, and the tooling raced to keep up.

In 1994, the first version of JavaScript dropped, opening the door to interactive, dynamic websites. In 1996, PHP arrived, making it dramatically easier to build sites that talked to databases.

By the late 90s, the rise of e-commerce and the spread of broadband internet sent demand for web development skills through the roof. That demand never reversed. Web development became a load-bearing pillar of the entire technology industry.

Today the field covers everything from web design and content development to client-side and server-side scripting and network security. It moves fast, and new tools and frameworks show up constantly.