I work on the web.

This is me. I work on the web.

Or rather, I worked on the web, and one day, soon, I'll work on the web again. I got online in 1986 when my dad brought home a Mac 512 (a.k.a. FatMac). I did the BBS thing for a while, but was intrigued by something called the Internet. I got on to the net in 1987 when I started a job at AT&T. I did production of computer manuals about computer networks, and then I wrote manuals about computer networks. That put me in a good place to discover the web when Mosaic came out in early 1993. I made my first web site a couple of weeks later. There were about 100 web sites in the world at the time.

I still worked as a writer for a while, because there weren't enough people who knew they needed web sites yet, but by 1995, I was doing it full time, working on internal e-commerce. In 1996, I became the webmaster for the internal Bell Labs site when Bell Labs and Lucent split off from AT&T, and by 1998, I was working on the external Bell Labs site as well. I wrote a content management system for the two sites. I got in to usability testing. I was a small part of the nascent information architecture community. I was also doing some goofy side projects.

Come 2001, all hell broke loose in the telecom and Internet businesses, and like 80% of my co-workers at Lucent, I was deemed expendable. I started 2002 on the unemployment line, attending state-run classes run by chirpy people telling everyone about the wonderful opportunities they would have to retrain from their archaic skills to enter wonderful new hot businesses like web design. I went six months without a bite. I was bored. I taught myself PHP and MySQL. I started a weblog, the project I used to teach myself PHP and MySQL. I finally caught on with a tiny startup a couple of towns over. It was a lot of fun. I would have been more fun if they remembered to pay me regularly instead of going two or three months of me badgering them before I would get paid. When they tried to sneak out of town after getting evicted from their offices, they owed me lots of money. I was screwed. I took a couple of months off from the job search and got married.

Three weeks after I got married, I got a call from a recruiter. They had a job that sounded like a good fit. It was at Lucent. It was for someone to help maintain the internal and external Lucent and Bell Labs sites. Hell yes it was a good fit; it was my old job. I was desperate. I took the job.

My beautiful semantically-coded valid HTML Bell Labs site had been vandalized with a profusion of tables. My content management system had been abandoned. I was heartbroken, but spent the next few years working to reintroduce the ideas I had worked with so long. I had some success and some failure. Mostly I spent my time working with the finest code 1996 had to offer. The cognitive dissonance was hell, but the pay was good, and my co-workers were friends.

The telecom industry never really recovered from the fall in 2001. A wounded Lucent would up surrendering to the tender overtures of a suitor, Alcatel. And come the closing of the merger in December, 2006, my web work disappeared.

I've still been working for the successor company, but not on the web. My boss held on to me for a while because there were rumblings of a web project that I would be a good fit for. I worked on a project printing paychecks that took advantage of my superior perl and shell scripting skills (???). But the web project didn't come through, and as of early October, 2007, I'm looking for a new job.

I love the web. I can't imagine working for an extended period of time on something else, even though I'm coming out of exactly that. I feel unbelievably privileged to have had the opportunity to work on the web at such an early stage. It was like starting in radio in 1920 or something. I'm hoping there's a company out there that can harness this passion and take advantage of all the things I've learned. I never stop learning.