How Far I've Come
Just like most people in these interesting times, I’ve had plenty of extra time around my house and this morning I decided to use some of it to do some digital cleaning. My Windows PC has a hard drive that I’ve been migrating all of my other drives to that have been in my PCs for the past 10 years. As you can imagine, there’s plenty of useless cruft but I’ve also found a bunch of good memories and photos. One finding in particular really stood out to me: my first website! At some point I want to write up the full story of how I got started with programming but long story short, I was (and still am) really into roller coasters when I was younger and wanted to make a website to showcase the pictures I was taking at theme parks. So I picked up some books on HTML and made what I thought was an awesome website. Ready for it?
Going to the Pictures link would take you to a <ul> of all of the theme parks I had pictures for and clicking on one of the rides in that list took you to this page:
I remember being really excited getting colors to work in the HTML and including the logos I had for the rides. But the biggest thrill for me was getting to upload the site to the only host I could find that gave free hosting. There was (and still is) something exhilarating about seeing what you spent so much time building actually live on the internet.
Take the Time to Reflect
I bring up this story to remind myself mostly to take the time to reflect on how far you’ve come. In my day to day job and in my side projects I find myself running up against the limits of my technical abilities and find myself really frustrated that I’m not as fast/wise/smart/whatever as my coworkers/other people on the internet. I see where I want to go and that I’m not there but I never take the time to see how far I’ve come. I’ve gone from these sites you’ve seen to actually good looking sites (norcalthrills.com is the one I’m most proud of at the moment) and that makes me feel so much better.