My Web Journey

In a recent post, I launched what will be a series on web development.  What better way to get this started than to review how we got here?  And to do that, indulge me, I will tell you (briefly) my own story with the web.

At Demo ’94 I had the opportunity to see the new ‘program’ MosaicaExported_ - 1 (1).  I had been working with the Internet for a good while, but this blew me out of my seat.  Here was a graphic rich environment with hyperlinks, that they were giving away for free.  Wow.
I had been working on a commercial effort named Interchange that did all this and a lot more, but it wasn’t free and it wasn’t open standards.  Needless to say, we were dead in the water (see the first chapter of my book Beginning Object Oriented Design and Devlopment (1998)).

From 1998 to 2000 I programmed the web in HTML and C++.  In 2000 I discovered C# and never looked back.  Two years later Active Server Pages came along, and once again, changed everything.  That was the real beginning of my professional web programming.

In 2007 I went to Microsoft to work on the XAML and C# framework:  Silverlight, and stayed until it was officially pronounced dead in 2012.  I then turned to XAML programming and evangelism until 2014 when  I started work with Xamarin (also a XAML & C# development framework; this time for mobile apps).

In 2015 I went back to being independent* and have been dividing my time between Xamarin and web programming since.  I created a number of web-oriented courses for Pluralsight such as Programming JavaScript from Scratch, Programming HTML From Scratch, CSS3 From Scratch and One ASP.Net From Scratch.  I also wrote a couple Pluralsight courses on creating Web Applications from start to finish, such as Building Web Apps and Services with EF and Web API and a few others.

I learned Angular JS through the efforts of my good friends Ward Bell and John Papa among other patient experts, and presented on Testing Angular JS at Angle BrackAngular2ets.  But then I closed my eyes and when I opened them a moment later, everything had changed.

ASP.NET 4 was now ASP.NET Core, and AngularJS was now Angular 2.  And these were not incremental changes; they were fairly revolutionary.  So I’m swimming as fast as I can to catch up.

Fortunately, the top level of ASP.NET Core is an easy transition from ASP.NET 4, and Angular 2 is not only better than Angular JS, it is easier to learn because it makes more sense.

This year I’m presenting again at Angle Brackets / Dev Intersections**, which is a kick, and in Moscow I’ll be presenting on Angular 2 (!)

That’s my story, what’s yours?  Please use the comments to tell me about your own history with the web.  By creating a common starting ground, we can move forward more quickly.

 

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* My friend Andy Knight once said “Going independent is trading the illusion of security for the illusion of independence.”

** For $50 off, use the discount word LIBERTY

About Jesse Liberty

Jesse Liberty has three decades of experience writing and delivering software projects and is the author of 2 dozen books and a couple dozen online courses. His latest book, Building APIs with .NET will be released early in 2025. Liberty is a Senior SW Engineer for CNH and he was a Senior Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, a Distinguished Software Engineer for AT&T, a VP for Information Services for Citibank and a Software Architect for PBS. He is a Microsoft MVP.
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