35 Years of WWW: Working as a Content Creator, Designer and Developer With the Coolest Medium Ever

I planned for much longer for this talk, so I only have 20 minutes, so I'm going to blaze through it a bit. But the bits and bobs I talk about are as valid fast as they are as valid slow.

So who am I? I'm a VP of DevRel. We are developers now. I wrote a few books. I worked on the biggest web products. I worked at Yahoo, Mozilla, Microsoft for eight years, presented over 100 conferences in three different languages. And I'm a trainer on LinkedIn and Skillshare and worked on Firefox, Microsoft Edge, VS Code, and Chromium DevTools. And all of that without having a university degree or a finished job education.

So when I left Microsoft and I moved back to Germany and I went to the unemployment office because I had to get my healthcare plan not being canceled on me, they looked at me and said, okay, so job education? None. Degree? None. Do you have a driving license? I'm like, yeah. Oh, we can work with that. So basically they offered me a pizza driver or something because through the German market, I'm still dead after 25 years.

What I do, though, is I work for we are developers, and I run our newsletter which is 150,000 subscribers, so a lot of the stuff I'm going to talk about today might be in there as well, so if you want to subscribe to, it's an interesting thing to do and it costs me a lot of time of my life that I don't use for personal grooming. So it's a thing that might be fun to sign up on. I also run the event next month in Berlin with 15,000 people coming and 8,000 companies and 500 plus speakers. And I had to go through 1,800 submissions, what people want to talk about, most of them about AI without knowing what AI was. But it was interesting to actually go through them. So if you want to come to that one, here's a 15% off QR code. It's also in the newsletter, so if you want to do that. If you want to come for free, I'm looking for moderators. I'm looking for people to run stages with me and actually interview people. Please talk to me. I'm desperate. It's only going to be a month and I'm freaking out.

But let's get started how I started, and this was the first laugh of my life after our family dog. The Commodore 64, there's one out there as well, it's still the best computer on the planet and still the most amazing thing. I'm lying though, because I couldn't afford one. So as a 9-year-old kid, I would go to a department store in my hometown where back then they just put up computers and let people do whatever they wanted with them, because the salespeople had no idea what those computers were, much like your salespeople don't know what you're doing nowadays.

So that didn't change much. But I was a 9-year-old kid and I was hacking away on that thing and I wrote really cool programs like this one. Like, what's your name? And if your name is Chris, it actually said you're cool. And if you said another name, then it's actually you're not cool. I got a bit better after that with my coding skills, but this was the kind of stuff that I was really excited about.

But what I really understood where something clicked with me was when I found a floppy disk in front of our school. And there was even a tire mark over it so it was a really, really messy thing. And I'm like, okay, that's cool, that's probably safe to put in a computer in a department store, so I did that. And what it was, it was a cracked game. And it was the game Ghosts and Goblins. And this is what it looked like.

Oops. This is what it looked like and you played it and I was shit at it. I'm still bad at computer games. And I always blamed the computer game until I realized it's actually me, but I was really bad at it. But then somebody came and looked over my shoulder when I was in the department store playing that game and he's like, let's restart that because I have this version of that game. And I'm like, what do you mean? And he said like, okay, just clear the screen, type TCS on the screen, and then run the game. And all of a sudden we had endless lives. I was like, this is magical. This is amazing. And I'm like, how is that done? He's like, well, somebody cracker trained the thing and actually gave you endless lives. And I was like, those crackers must be something really special. Those must be people that actually know things, magical things that we didn't know. And then I learned about this one when I finally had my Commodore 64 and I actually did paper rounds and all kind of things. And I learned about this thing called Action Replay. Action Replay, you put it in the back of the machine and you actually froze the memory. You stopped whatever the computer was doing and it did a whole copy of the memory onto that thing and then you could then actually look at it. Much like we do dumps of memory now and then we look at them but back then it stopped the execution. Much like when you do console log debugging, you don't stop the execution. When you do breakpoints, you stop the execution.

So what should we use? Thousands of console messages, of course. And then I learned about how to give myself endless lives by just freezing the thing and looking at the memory of the screen. And the memory of the screen starts at like 0400 and I found the life counter. So basically I looked at like, okay, where's the number that is how many lives I have? And then I lost a life and then I realized this is the thing that actually changed. So I hunt the memory for the CE 1004 with decrement 0410 and assembly and then just wrote knop knop knop over it and I had endless lives and I was magical as well. And it was just wonderful to see that because I could give myself endless lives without having to know how to play a game. And the door was open and I took one step time at exploring.

What I learned about this is if you don't have the skill but you are devious enough to look at things and you actually want to find out where things come from, you can give yourself a skill set that you don't have. And then, of course, I said, just do it. Like I can be a programmer. I can do something like that. And I started writing my own games by analyzing the other games and stealing things from there and there and finding things and putting things together. And then, of course, I learned that nothing can hold you back when you're good at analyzing and repeating. Just look at other people's stuff and see what they've been doing and repeat it with yourself. And let's not kid ourselves. Everything on screen came from somewhere. It's never set in stone. As soon as it can be displayed, it can be copied. It can be analyzed. It can become yours. You know, if buying something doesn't mean you own it, then copying it is not piracy. I'm not saying that. It's basically a thing that we do here. And it's much more fun to explore and tweak things than to build something yourself.

To start with something else. Much like when you have a team and you want to go for lunch break and you ask everybody where they want to go, you get 50,000 offers and you're not finding one. You give them four things and say, like, which one do you hate? And then you have a decision within three seconds. Or if you want to go on social media or on Stack Overflow and you want a fast answer, don't ask a question. Give a wrong result and let people tell you how wrong you are because they give you the right answer that way. People are much happier with doing that.

And the other thing I learned is that working in a limited, an unknown environment, like in my case, oh, my God, that TCS thing, is a powerful challenge. It's a wonderful challenge. I jumped from every programming language, every framework, every content management system in my career. When I was in England and when I started in England in 1997, I was in enterprise content management system environments. I had my CV full of words that don't mean a thing any longer, but everybody is like, oh, my God, you know that. I didn't understand it anymore. You don't need to feel limited by the environment you target. You actually should see this as an opportunity when you want to create something. So when people always said, like, I love iOS because everything is so smooth and so amazing and the web is dirty and grimy, I'm like, yeah, but it's much more inviting for everybody out there. It's like, I don't have to have a Vision Pro to start developing something. I need a text editor. This is awesome. Let's do that. The more people do this, the best practices get shared. The more people just start doing things. This was also on the Commodore 64. This was basically when you did graphics there, you had 160 by 200 pixels on a 320 by 200 pixel display. You had 16 predefined colors and every eight by eight pixels you can use three colors and one background color. So it was more like math in your head when you were pixeling things than actually pixeling things. This is what most of the games looked like. There was actually the Ultima V that was ported from Mac over to C64. And a friend of mine in Norway, Vanya Udne, who's also a good comic book designer, she did that version of that same picture and it's the same hardware. It's the same specs and basically because she thought about it more. Of course, there were decades in between. There's much better tooling now. There's more experience and there's actually a shared trickery and knowledge. People showed you like how you can make these pixels look better by having two pixels with a close color to each other, anti-aliasing, things like machines. For us now, we had to do it all by hand. But it just shows that you can make amazing results even with really crappy hardware and really limited environments if you think about it. And then the web came around.

And I was like, this is cool. I worked as a radio journalist back then, so I did the news at a local radio station in Germany. And the web came around and I'm like, OK. Sold it. I quit my job. I built my first website, downloading the HTML spec and building a website for myself. That was funnily enough a tutorial how to write HTML. So I basically taught myself the thing by doing it.

And then I had a first customer which was a solicitor who wanted to have a website and I built a website for him and then he asked me what a telephone number is to reach his website. So he didn't quite know what the web was. He just wanted to have a website. And then BMW contacted me and said like we need somebody to build our intranet. And after I had that on my CV, things skyrocketed. Again, I should have been shit-scared to go work for BMW, but I'm like, yeah, I can do that. I don't mind. And that's what has happened.

And what I learned from the cracking experience or that playing with the games experience was that view source on the web was exactly the same thing. A big part of my success of web was using view source and reverse engineering, looking what other people had done. And let's not kid ourselves, everybody does that. Everybody takes things from other people, changes numbers around. If nothing explodes, you wrote code. Like when I did Pearl, there was mad script archive full of access vulnerabilities, but everybody just copied and pasted those few scripts. Nowadays we create 60,000 packages in NPM and we wonder why things are working, but it's actually the same thing.

The lack of distance between creation and consumption was really down my alley. That's why I never got into Java, C++, environments where I don't have an interface, I don't have nothing to mess up, I don't have nothing that the end user gets. And I don't want to have a compilation step in between. When people started having JavaScript with 15 minutes of compilation, I'm like, what's going on here? What are you doing? And then we have another 30 minute of compilation to take out the code we shouldn't have written and optimize it again rather than thinking about what we put in the first place. The things I learned in my career, a lot of it was like you learn best by teaching. If you really want to know something, teach it to other people. I was a professional JavaScript developer, paid well, and then I wrote my first JavaScript book in 2006, and I realized I don't know why this works. I have no idea what the code does that I'm actually writing and what it actually means. And then I started finding patterns and gave them names and people come up to me at JavaScript conference, you're the guy who invented that JavaScript pattern. I gave it a name and tried to understand it myself. So this is how these things work. But teaching something, you realize you cannot bullshit any more. You cannot pretend that you know you actually have to know it. Sharing and making people grow with you is the best feeling ever. I've got lots of engineers that worked for me that are now founders and company owners and millionaires, and I'm not grumpy about that. I'm actually happy that they have their career. I don't have millions, that's fine, I don't need them. But it's very cool to see people around you grow and move around in different departments, and it's wonderful to see.

If you feel down and not good enough for anything, just create something. Anything. Write some code to make you happy. On last Friday, I was like, okay, segmented circles look cool, so how about I do that? And I would normally do it in Canvas and then I did it in SVG just to test myself if I can do it. Okay, chat GPT, CorePilot helped me a lot with it. And basically I'm like, okay, I built something for me and put it on Twitter, and again, 50 people cloned it, and people are like, oh, this is cool, and it's like, okay, I just want to play with something because I felt like I had lost an argument with my girlfriend or something. I wanted to have something to feel better about.

Languages, platforms, and tools come and go. I remember when Flash was the thing and everybody was like, and then Silverlight, and everybody is like, you need to know this, or you need to be on Android, you need to be on iOS, you need to be on Windows Mobile, no, nobody has ever said that, you need to Blackberry, whatever, QT, stuff, all these things came and went. The platform and the basics, the languages is the things that are staying and are more important. The main goal is to build things people can use regardless of set up and ability. Thinking about internationalization, thinking about accessibility was something that made a huge part of my career. We spent three weeks making the color picker in the developer tools of Chrome available to screen reader users, which feels weird, like why should a blind person pick a color, but not only blind people use screen readers, people who have problems with mobility as well use them, and now the color picker is better for everybody out there as well. Thinking about the end user, religiously, always thinking about the end user to make it easier for them made my career and made me happy as well.

Other things I learned is that analysing, fixing, and optimising code is much more inviting than writing it. This is where GenAI comes in. People are always worried about what is the story of a junior developer nowadays if a prompt can actually generate the same code? In your career, the higher you go up, like from junior to senior to principal to whatever other weird job titles I had in my career, I wrote less and less code and I reviewed other people's code or defined standards for code that other people write. Nowadays, the first level of writing is probably done by generative AI, and the skill set of knowing what code does, where the problems are, where the performance issues are, where the security holes are is the thing that is much more important than writing a lot of code. The amount of lines of code that people write is the stupidest metric you can ever do, because I can always write code that generates itself and have 5,000 lines of code in three minutes. That's not really a measure of quality code. Clever solutions get you famous and promoted but hurt you in the long term. A lot of times, less optimised more readable code was actually giving me a longer-term career than a really cool solution that got people excited about something. That was really clever. It's also everybody maintaining it has to be as clever in the same mindset, so it's probably not going to be a thing for a product that a lot of people have to work with. Things I saw failing, closed-path platforms, they move fast and they die young. This is always the thing. There is always something that will flash, still alive, whatever. Anything that wanted to replace the web died a horrible death, and didn't go away, it just left a lot of crap on the web that we now have to deal with and we now have to somehow get in there. WebAssembly when that came out is basically used now to use lots of Java applet environments and now put them in the browser or C++ solutions that people wrote 50 years ago, and I don't know, but it's amazing that the closed platforms all went away in my career. People fixing the current web by patching it instead of contributing was a clever thing at the time but felt really, really fast as a bad idea.

JQuery fixed the web. Now, we have millions of installs of JQuery and outdated installs of WordPress on the web that are almost an attack vector, a performance issue, and, actually, a maintenance issue as well, but it solved problems really quickly.

The web is there to contribute. You can go to the W3C and say, like, that stuff is broken, please fix that. Everybody is invited. There's IRC, not IRC anymore, I think they went also to Discord, but there are also calls you can dial in as anybody, you don't have to be a W3C member, you can just listen in, you can read the notes, you can go back to them and say, like, the web should do this, please do it.

What's built in a hurry promoted to be fully useful never worked out either. You always do an MVP or something from a hackathon and let's turn this into a product. No, let's ditch it. Let's take the idea of it and start a new project because pimping your WordPress to become something else is probably never a good idea because you have so many security holes to think of.

FewSource became this. We have developer tools now in the browser and I was the technical product manager of tools of Edge and Chromium ones, shared with Google for a long time, and I love these things to bits. All the insights we have in there, I have a LinkedIn course how to mess with the web even not as a developer to basically use these things to change text around, to download videos that you shouldn't download, and all these kinds of things that you can do with developer tools. Developer tools make the difference. They have to replace FewSource and we have incredible insights into what our code does in the browser. But not everybody is ready for this. This was a piece of feedback that I was on Facebook, I think. My Facebook suddenly split in half and the screen popped up with all these random cyberspace options and it was like watching and assessing things so weird. I'm talking about child and children being forced, so child-node forcing kind of thing. Is this some sort of cyber police thing that my IP was accidentally allowed to access, and so on and so forth.

This is where we come in. There is still a huge divide between people using the web or using apps and not understanding that they would be in control to build these, to create these, to change these as well. We are at the forefront of web media. We are actually there to build these things, work with them, and I think we're creators and makers, not just consumers. We are also consumers, but to me, the web was always everybody could be a creator. The level to create something, to push something out there, should be really, really low. We have the privilege of open tools and open platform and open available documentation. You don't have to pay to learn web standards. You don't have to pay to learn accessibility. You can find really cool things free online.

Getting started has never been easier. Use GitHub to host your code, collaborate, execute your projects, write documentation and books.

GitHub Pages is really useful now. Remember when it came out, you just wrote a GitHub page, and you're building something in the background. You had no insight how long it would take, if it works or not. Now you've got the logs where something is being built in the background.

You can use social media to promote these products, share knowledge, and invite people to learn more. And you're building on existing solutions. Don't start from scratch. Contribute to existing products. There's lots of projects out there that need contribution, and the whole exit thing showed if we don't do it, then the bad players of the web do it. You don't even need to code, help with UX, document, or hurt communities for people. Use your frustration with products, anger, and your deviousness for good.

I want to download things on Disney+. Yes, you can do it with developer tools. I'm not telling you how. You can. Play with that thing. There's nothing in software that should be locked away from you. It's an open platform, and it's the best platform there was.

What we need more than ever is education. People realizing you're not in control. You should be in control, not the app provider that you do that thing. You should actually talk to your local government and say, no, I don't want to download an app, I want to go to a bloody website and type the thing in. You know where I live. Don't send me a letter that I actually have to validate the thing with two-factor authentication over mobile phone or fax. Traditional education is encumbered by privilege and cost. It's really tough for universities to realize what is going on in the market right now.

We've been lucky. I think it's time to give back.

The web is the most versatile and non-elitist platform. It's democracy in the making. A view source democracy. We all could be part of that, much like we can be part of democracy in our governments. Sadly enough, people vote the wrong things at the moment, but there is another story we can talk about. Go and make your mark. Do something. Anything. People want you, and people want to see.

The most successful blog posts that I have are things that I wrote down so I don't forget it myself. I find myself Googling something 20 years later and realizing I find my own blog, and I'm like, you knew that? But basically, people need your information, no matter how mediocre or weird it is. Don't let them stop you from publishing cool stuff and writing code just for the sake of having fun with it.

And that's all I had, so thank you very much! Lace off. Companies offering mutual termination agreements, outsourcing. Hard to find jobs for juniors, so how real is that market? Maybe your general advice, how to start your job as a junior, let's be focused, web developer. Any thoughts? I'm just more worried about this question. That sounds like Chet Chippity trying to make a rap.

How to start as a junior developer? Contribute to things. Contribute to open source things, try out what other people are doing. Boot camps are normally a waste of money. It's about two years ago, you get a boot camp, and you become a React developer at Meta tomorrow, not going to happen, a lot of fake things going on there. Look at other people's stuff, what they do. Go to conferences, watch the conference videos for free on YouTube afterwards. And layoffs, I think, I had a few talks about this, you can look those up, because I was late at Microsoft after eight years, as a total surprise as well. So there was a short idea that companies thought, like, when our stock price is falling, we have to get rid of people, because that means the stock price goes up again. All the layoffs were not about quality of people, or quality of the product, it was just a very, like, shooting yourself in the foot reaction to the stock market crashing, with the Ukraine situation, other things basically outside things dealing with the job market. I'm really unhappy about this. At the same time, I found it also inflationary how many people we hired just on the off chance that after COVID, the demand for computing will be as big as it was during COVID. But I think if you get laid off, and, I mean, we are developers, it's also a job board, we have 150,000 jobs there right now. So if you want to take a look there and look around, be my guest to find something there as well. And don't go for, like, don't feel depressed if Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and others don't hire you. Maybe find a smaller company that's local to you, that allows you to do things like four-day work weeks, or have a social life, or have an impact in the company as well. It's fun, I mean, you were at Microsoft, I was at Microsoft, it's great to be in these places, but sometimes just being in a smaller company that sounds more boring, gives you more opportunities as a junior developer. And, of course, startups, you could actually make a lot of money quickly and then go away, but don't trust that you're going to have a long-term career there.

Thanks, thanks for your answer. And just noticed the nickname of the person who asked this question. I want a free ticket to VR Developers Congress. By the way, I'll be there as a speaker. Let me answer this. Christian mentioned that he's looking for moderators. This is your chance to get there for free. We have a trending question, I'd say.

Let me pick this one on the stage. Does the Internet feel better or worse placed compared to 10, 20, 30 years ago? Let's pick one, something, let's say 10 years ago. I think the Internet, well the web right now, is very much under attack by marketing forces. And Google, I wrote about this five years ago where I said the web starts at page four. Because in the past, I went into Google, typed something in, I found a web result. Now I find 6,000 ads, 5,000 things that they may think what I've been looking for, but it doesn't give me any web results any longer. Twitter right now, if I actually put a link inside a tweet, it actually demotes it. It wants to have interaction. That's why every bloody tweet is a question now, and I'm like, I don't have time to answer your bloody questions. And I like a link because it validates the thing that I said, rather than just being there. And now the AI, like summaries that Google rolled out and then really really quickly unrolled out as well, is another thing. We right now have to actually fight for the web to become a thing and stay relevant for people as well. Because TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, all these addiction machines keep people away from just realizing that you could publish and that you can actually read things up as well. How many times do you look something up right now because of SEO optimization in the last five years? I want to make pancakes. Where's a pancake recipe? Here's a 15-minute YouTube video with like five-minute introducing the sponsor of the video before it goes to the pancake. Like no, just give me the bloody pancake recipe, or I buy a book. You know, like it's just amazing how these interactive things that actually make people be influencers or creators of the web took away that easy website out there. And I loved when I worked at Yahoo for the search engine that there were like thousands of grandmothers with their recipe books online, really terrible websites, almost unreadable, but nobody could stop them from putting them there and they were super happy and proud of it. And I think we need more of those things again as well. Build simple things. Don't make it like, this is how to do it viral. If it gets viral, if it turns viral, it turns viral. But don't have that as the end goal. Yeah, do simple things.

Super, super good answer. And let's pick the last one that, what you can answer really, really briefly. Yeah. Frameworks. Come and go. How to get out of this loop of following the latest trendy things? Don't use them.

Don't jump on every framework that you want to jump on. Validate several of them. If I look at what we're dealing with right now, and we are developers, we have larger companies, very much traditional companies, they're all on Angular still. And it's still a huge market because that basically, they have to go through audits, they have to go through tests with these things, they have to be GDPR compliant, all kinds of things. By all means, write another framework, play with another framework, find other solutions. But don't just use the framework for the sake of it.

I think there's a worrying thing where a lot of frameworks overwrite things that the web is already doing, or clash with it. And that's something that we had in the past with like Mutools and these kind of things, which meant that the JavaScript language didn't get certain function names because they were actually used by the framework already. I think the framework thing is great to get you started quickly. To do something very quick and easy and get it out there. But it's not necessarily... I've always had a warning sign in my head when I use something and I didn't know what it does. Like the Harry Potter thing. Like if it does magic and you don't know where it came from, it's probably an evil thing. And that's what frameworks felt to me a lot of times as well. If I have to go and actually create a lot of code, delete a lot of code, and to optimize it, because in the end, what the end user sees in the browser is the most important thing, not how easy it was for you to create it.

So I'm very happy that there are these frameworks out there. The platform can learn a lot from these frameworks as well. But just when you... I do this Code 100 competition. We do a live coding competition at our event as well. 10,000 Euro for the main prize. And I do have to do all the coding exercises for people to fill out. And it was incredibly frustrating. I wrote this JavaScript test and basically it was like three lines of code that I wrote for myself to solve it. And people didn't manage for ten minutes on stage to even get started to solve that problem because we didn't allow them to use third-party packages. And that's something that we should be worried about. The skillset of just writing code or understanding logic as a programmer, rather than the package does that magically for you. I gave up on believing in things that say magically solves things for you. Never works.

And I mean... I'm a redhead, so I know about magic. So it's all good. Actually, I expected you to say that the main blocker for this participant competition was waiting for npm install to complete. I do love the... I posted about this the other day. There's an npm package called dash. Just the dash letter. And it's basically 40,000 installs per week. And it's because... It happens because when you do npm install minus minus g or you put another extra minus in there, you install the minus package instead of the package that you want to install. There's also a package called g and a package called i. It's a really, really bad idea what's going on there. This is the magic.

Okay. We have many more questions to Christian. And you can find him out there in the Q&A place.