In the late 90s, while still at college, I worked part-time for a local ISP designing and building websites. This was pre-CSS...
My toolkit was delightfully humble: notepad.exe, and later HotDog – one of the first WYSIWYG editors – and a second-hand copy of Photoshop 3 (v4 had just launched, so my friends and I clubbed together to buy it cheap—it came on a pile of physical 'stiffy' disks!)
We'd preview everything on the glorious Netscape Navigator
When early CSS emerged, I bowed out of coding – I loved the idea of CSS, but the browser wars, and the vanilla designs (CSS Zen Garden anyone?) didn't match what I believed was possible using fixed table layouts with spacers, or the next hot thing: FutureWave aka Flash!
Many, many years later, I had a brief stint as an Interactive Designer, coding semantic HTML & CSS for both a Ruby on Rails site, and a static site generator. I was introduced to git in the command line at this point. But the experiment ended after I realised I was compromising: I'd started designing to the limitations of the platform (and my own abilities) rather than trying to solve problems the best way possible.
Now, many years on, I'm feeling that original early Internet spark again. Cursor IDE (and Claude.ai) have brought me back to those early days of possibility. That simple, powerful feeling:
If you can think it, you can make it!
(This very blog, thanks to Cursor, is a port of ~1500 tumblr posts)