KuraFire Network

So Ryan tagged me with a meme ("Oh god not those again!") which asks the question: where were you one, five and ten years ago? Well…

One year ago

About this time, one year ago, I was working at Media Design as a designer and programmer. I was busy with adding the comments feature to their CMS called Snelsite, which also powers this site. I was a PC user (god, it seems so long ago now), my site was still in version 6 (8 now), I'd never gone to a web-related conference yet and most of my readers consisted of my Dutch friends of Happy Clog.

If one year ago you would've told me that in exactly one year I would've been a Mac user, running my own company, speaking at conferences and heading to a career in California, I would have looked at you very funny.

Five years ago

In April of 2001, I was working for a company called Taxus Interactive in Rotterdam. I built websites for them using tables and spacer GIFs and what not, using Dreamweaver for much of it and generally just being part of the dotcom high days. I didn't know how to program a single line of code, my best design work was a weird-ass front page and accompanying header graphic that a some of my online friends gawked about, but which was as artsy-fartsy and unclassy as Tim Burton in clay, and had only just discovered the musical brilliance of Ayreon.

If five years ago you would've told me that in exactly five years I would have lost my job because the IT market crashed, I would absolutely despise using visual tools such as Dreamweaver to create table-based layouts, that we'd be using CSS and semantic markup for websites and that I'd be very proficient in PHP and SQL, I would have looked at you very funny.

Ten years ago

Oh wow, ten years… that's a scary long time, in my life so far. Hmm, well, ten years ago I was in elementary school because my school had 7 years rather than the usual 6, and since it's April now I wasn't yet in high school. I was in my last year and was spending more time dealing with the drama at school surrounding my constantly shrinking class (started out with 36 children seven years earlier, only 13 remained at this point) than thinking about my future. I really enjoyed computer games though, especially brilliant ones like Sam & Max Hit the Road by Lucasarts.

If ten years ago you would've told me that I'd be considered as the most active kid in high school, participating in every extra-curricular activity the school had to offer besides the school musical, that I'd become an actual games journalist writing for the Netherlands' very first online games magazine, would become a programming and web design professional and would end up leaving this country behind, I… well, I was funny-looking at that time anyway, never mind.

Update: I completely forgot to forward this, my bad! I will poke Robert Nyman, Molly and Guy Kawasaki.

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