The origin story nobody asks about but everyone should.
1995? 1994? 1993? 1992?
We all have our Eben Visher. My parents family friend, Eben Visher, typed commands into a black screen while I watched like it was sorcery, as he would come over all the time to fix our computers. This was sorcery, at least to a seventh grader who just wanted to play basketball on a computer, watching someone speak to a machine and have it listen was indistinguishable from magic. Floppy Disks and DOS FTW! #IYKYK.
He taught me foobar. Not because I needed to know placeholder variables to run a game, but because he understood something most people still get wrong about teaching. Context is free, hand it out!! To think FooBar was a thing back then and sticks with me today is wild. I still remember honestly not understanding WHY do I care that something is named "throwaway" didn't make sense back then.
Anyway... around this same time, GeoCities happened.
For anyone who missed this era, GeoCities was the internet's first subdivision. You picked a neighborhood, you got a plot, and you built whatever site you wanted with whatever skills you had, which for most of us was none. The web was a junk drawer and we were all contributing our junk with pride.
I built X-Files fan pages. Doom shrines (Mr Dooms page was hands down the best and seeing it today is still fun - its as though it hasn't changed since 1996). I put an animated Kermit the Frog on my homepage waving people in because that was peak design in 1996. It was hideous. It was perfect. It was mine.
I figured out how to use javascript to prompt a user for input, store it, and display it back on screen - this is the moment that stuck with me.
"Welcome Jake!!"
Not machine learning or distributed systems, just a simple text box, a variable, and an output. The atomic unit of every application ever built. I just didn't know it yet.
Twenty-five years later I'm still chasing that same feeling. Input, logic, output. The complexity scaled and in some cases ... well it's the same. The dopamine hit never changed, but the IDE did :) No longer using Microsoft Frontpage 95.
❤️
Jake