Today, I’d probably be some low-level code-monkey in an office somewhere, with a sizable cache of money saved away, but I wouldn’t really do much in my off hours. I wouldn’t learn all that much new, besides some programming stuff, I wouldn’t have my own site, and I wouldn’t have my own WordPress blog.
Essentially, I’d have the most boringly plain life.
On February 19th, though, I read a blog entry about the CSS Zen Garden, which shot me off in a completely different direction. I learned about entirely new industries, and found the place I want to be. I call that date my epoch. Everything else in my life was just leading up to it.
But why did I visit that site?
- I was half-heartedly making something for ‘my first client’, and maybe I wanted inspiration. If I wasn’t making a webpage for him, I might never have revisited the CSS Zen Garden, at least not in the same way.
- The site was recommended by an instructor in a course that had nothing to do with that subject. If I had gotten a different instructor for that same class, I may have never heard about the Garden.
- I had only made a serious attempt at a website because I was roped in by another friend, who I only met because of a strange time coincidence in his own life, and his own life-altering experience. He very nearly died before he met me.
(At the same time, I think web design did interest me, and it’s in my blood to push myself towards art. I have no clue if I’d have ended up deciding to learn web-page making in my off time, and then finding the community I found.)
The blog entry I had read was linked from Dave Shea‘s resources page: Doug Bowman’s write-up about his CSS Zen Garden submission. Today, I retraced my steps: After reading that, I had went to his blog. His latest entry at the time was a link to the blog of Eric Meyer, who pined about the need for a new way to lay out documents. His second link pointed me to Shaun Inman‘s post from 2006 that talks about making equal-height columns of content, and the javascript he had developed as a fix to do that. At that moment, I remember reading the comments and thinking to myself, “I have no clue who these people are, but that doesn’t matter. I’ll know them, eventually.”
Reading back on them today, I see very familiar names. Eric Meyer, of course, said something. There was Ethan Marcotte, also known as ‘beep‘ (the unstoppable robot ninja), who actually just got married on Saturday, and who was then still using the name ‘sidesh0w‘. I saw Andy Clarke, who goes as ‘Malarkey‘.
It strikes me that virtually everyone from this world is unknown to the average person. As far as computers go, everyone knows about Bill Gates and most people know about Steve Jobs, but that’s almost it. What about Jeffrey Zeldman, the Web Standards Pioneer, who created (and is executive creative director of) Happy Cog, the biggest web-design company in America? Molly Holzschlag, who managed to snag molly.com, and who worked to bring modern web standards to IE7 and IE8? Jason Santa Maria, the leading print-designer on the web, and creative director of A List Apart? And hundreds of other names I have no time to link to.
But that’s alright. The world is just such that we only ever learn a few names from the most powerful companies. But I know my own, and I’ve found my place.