I’m not one to yearn for the past. What we have today is an unimaginable leap in capability and features when it comes to development.

Instead, I thought it would be fun to catalogue a few things that were normal back then. It might be funny. I couldn’t recall everything anyway. My mind probably won’t let me. For safety reasons.

Unfettered Internet Access

My first memory of contributing to the web was in the early 2000s, on phpBB forums. There were these short codes, or BBCodes as they were officially called. They were mostly used for formatting, like [i]italic[/i], but there might have been custom ones for different functions as well. I can’t remember exactly. Maybe my mind is telling me something there.

I made “signatures” for myself and others: little 300x150 pixel graphics, emblazoned with a username. I’d boot up a cracked version of Photoshop, create clouds, layer brushes, warp lens flares, and slap on a “render” (a cutout) of a video game character. You’d bang out a few of those a week for friends or folks on the forum.

A More Deliberate Direction

In college I learned how to build websites and write software. This involved Flash, HTML and Java.

The Flash approach was more interesting. Less limiting. We wrote ActionScript and designed custom graphics. We’ve been striving to return to that way for a while, but it’s not the same.

We would create websites in Photoshop (a legit copy). From there we’d slice up the image in Dreamweaver and jam those images into tables. Responsive design wasn’t a thing yet. Or accessibility, really. Though in fairness, you weren’t limited to CSS; it was whatever you could imagine.

Outside of that there was Java, with NetBeans and Eclipse. We had a Mac lab that ran Parallels so we could use Windows. It felt like a waste of decent hardware, but it gave me some exposure to Mac, even if it was just booting up and launching a program.

I remember we had an Android Development module, and I got a talking-to for writing my app in a webview. It was still technically an app that fulfilled the brief, but it wasn’t in the spirit of things. Sorry, Ita.

First Blood

I did a work placement as part of my course, and it was mostly graphic design and front-end fixes. Most of these fixes were for Internet Explorer 6.

Quirks mode. Padding. Spacer GIFs. zoom: 1. It was wild, and all of it was just to make sure our changes didn’t break anything in IE7. We monitored any chatter about support for IE6 being dropped, but that didn’t help when customers were still using it.

Fake It ’Til You Make It

I graduated and landed a job as a web developer. I remember being shown fancy-looking buttons with gradients in the interview, and I assured them I could do that. I didn’t say I could do it right now, but I was sure I could figure it out.

I brought along my knowledge of IE6. It felt like that wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Designers loved gradients, but some browsers didn’t. That’s where the likes of CSS3 PIE came in. Drop in a .htc file and everyone was happy.

That’s where I met WordPress. We had been doing static websites, but now customers wanted more control, rather than emailing us with copy updates. Understandable.

WordPress led to Joomla! and Drupal. I had no idea about them, but figured it out along the way. We even had a customer request a WordPress installation inside of their Joomla! installation. It worked, but felt wrong. It was like asking a sparrow to lay a goose egg. You just make the swap when no one’s looking and exclaim TA-DA!

What Starts Well

Again, I’m not looking back too fondly here. There were moments of pure creativity built from necessity, which was the most exciting part. Could I compare that to the landscape of today? Not so much, I think. We have the tools now in abundance, all thanks to those wild years of figuring things out.