This post is ten years late. Let me explain.
It was 2010 and the world wide web was flourishing again. Internet Explorer’s reign was coming to an end, and the introduction of the iPhone and iPad had revitalised the industry with new techniques and technologies like Responsive Web Design, HTML5 (with its new APIs and friendlier syntax).
And there I was, ten years younger, in the middle of summer break, having just finished Ethan Marcotte’s book Responsive Web Design. Excited about everything I had learned, the idea was clear: I was going to build My Personal Website™, and I was going to do it using the latest technology.
I didn’t have much time, so while I designed and developed the definitive site, I decided to put up a simple temporary page with links to my social profiles (using CSS 3, naturally, and with a mobile first approach) as a teaser for the final site I’d surely ship any day now.
Naïve of me. I had no idea that the most intense period of my career was just around the corner. In just three years we built five native mobile apps — four of them for one of the biggest companies in Spain, and another that won an award — all in an industry that was still in its infancy, learning as we went. It was a period that made me professionally, but nearly broke me personally.
By 2013, social networks were at their peak, Google Reader shut down, and with it blogging was put on life support. Business card-style pages had become the new standard for anyone who wanted a personal web presence without the time to maintain a blog.
As fate would have it, my little teaser was exactly that — so I decided to keep it and update it over the years, adding and removing social links as their relevance shifted.
Now it’s 2020 and the web finds itself in a similar moment. After surviving “The App Menace” and “Attack of the Social Networks,” we are in a new renaissance, with innovations like Progressive Web Applications and JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs and HTML).
As for me, here I am again — ten years wiser, in the middle of winter break, with my shiny new blog built with Gatsby and hosted entirely on GitHub. This time with the lesson learned: no more teasers.
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
– Chinese Proverb
In these ten years I have lived and learned a great deal, and that is precisely what motivated me to start this blog. I find myself more and more often advising, teaching, or sharing tricks with colleagues and friends, and I’ve come to realise that the information has value beyond my immediate circle.
For a while now, whenever I share my experience with someone, I ask myself whether it would have been useful to the me of ten years ago. That has become the criterion I use to decide whether something is worth writing about.
They say knowledge kept is knowledge lost, and that is what I intend to avoid with this blog. I don’t consider myself a guru or an expert, but I hope the content here is useful to you and to anyone who stumbles upon it.