Looking Back (msnbc.com turns 10)

I came across this page on MSNBC.com today, talking about msnbc.com's 10th anniversary, and it really spun me back - especially the main photo taken in 1997.  In the center of that photo are David Kaill (with the beard), and Brendan West (red hair, glasses). David was my boss then, and Brendan was my lead, and mentor. I joined MSNBC shortly after they launched, right around the time IE4 was in a late alpha release (if you were doing web work back then - IE4 betas were really interesting, all of the dhtml, css, filtering, remote scripting and more were launched along with it - all the elements of AJAX were born back then).

David Kaill was a great boss - he was so amazingly supportive and transparent, I knew from the first few minutes of my interview that I had the job (I found the job through an ad in the newspaper - no kidding). They were looking for a web developer that knew javascript, and I'd been experimenting with it for well over a year by then - he was so excited - it got me psyched, it was great. I really felt like I was stepping into the big leagues, having previously done web work at a small boutique house in Seattle (freerange media), and a dinky newspaper.

We were on Microsoft's campus in Redmond, and one of my first tasks was to create an "active channel" page for msnbc.com that would get baked into the release of IE4 (remember Active Channels? Push? IE's Channel Bar?) The result was this page (IE-only, yep). It was a slideshow that originally had a Realaudio embedded "Get Connected" song playing on load. I secretly removed that after launch, cause I hated it so much. Don't tell anyone. Looking at the source code from that page, I can see how far I've come, how sloppy it all was, how little I actually knew about what I was doing.

So if msnbc.com is 10, and I had two years of experience before joining them, that means I'm coming up on my 12-year anniversary of doing things online (creating, coding, writing, experimenting). That's just... a long time. And, oddly enough, I'm back in the Online News biz at the Boston Globe.

The Flickr Way

And - I'm amazed at how much there still is to learn. I've been reading Cal Henderson's book 'Building Scalable Websites', and I'm floored by the breadth and depth of knowledge in there - the number of things (systems, languages, methods) that I've only briefly used, or had barely heard of, despite 12 years of doing this... It's awesome, in the best, real sense of the word. I love to learn and do and make and build, and there's no end in sight - things get more powerful and simpler all the time, and I love to figure out how to make them all dance together.

It's a great feeling to have, to discover that you have chosen a career (without consciously choosing it as a "career"), and a dozen years later, you are still challenged, still valued, still having a great time, and still learning every damn day. My early days at msnbc.com were exciting in every sense of the word. Remember Derek Powazek's essay "stoked"? - I loved that piece. I identified with it totally, and it still makes me feel good reading it today.

I may not be stoked every day - working a 9-to-5 job and weathering a layoff or two tends to grind that right out of you, but I'm happy, and proud of what I've done, and look forward to the next 12 years.