xv
preface
Back in 1995 I got my first taste of web development, putting together a few pages of
simple
HTML
for a piece of university coursework. It was a small part of my course,
which was a mixture of software engineering and communication studies. This was an
unusual mixture. I learned the fundamentals of software development, database design,
and programming. But I also learned about the importance of the audience and end-
user and how to communicate with them, both verbally and non-verbally.
In 1998, on the communication studies side of the degree, I was required to write a
publication for an organization of my choice. I decided to write a prospectus for the
school where my mother was teaching at the time. But I decided to do it as a website.
Again this was all front-end work. Fortunately I no longer have a copy of it, as I shudder
at the thought of the code. We’re talking
HTML
with frames, table layouts, inline styles,
and a smattering of basic JavaScript. By today’s standards it was shocking, but back then
it was quite futuristic. I was the first person at the university to submit a website as a pub-
lication. I even had to tell my instructors how to open it in their browser from the floppy
disk it was submitted on! After it was completed and marked, I sold the website to the
school it was about. I figured there was probably a future in this web development thing.
During the following years I made use of both parts of my degree working as the “web
guy” in a London design agency. Because it was a design agency, user-experience (before
it was called
UX
) and the front end were crucial. But of course there has to be a back
end to support the front end. As the only web guy I fulfilled both roles as the classic full-
stack developer. There wasn’t much separation of concerns in those days. The database
was tightly coupled to the back end. Back-end logic, markup, and front-end logic all
Licensed to Mark Watson <nordickan@gmail.com>
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