Why I Became a Developer (And Why I'm Still Here 17 Years Later)

I'm about to age myself... I was a MySpace kid 😬 I'm talking gifs, background images, and an autoplay song that was basically my whole personality in 3 minutes or less. Updated weekly, of course. Blasting the second somebody landed on my page. No warning. No apologies. tiktok.com And if you were one of those people who actually dug into the code to make your profile look way different from everybody else's...same. We could've been good friends. That whole era was my first real taste of building something on a screen that other people could actually experience. I didn't have a name for what that feeling was. I just knew I loved it. The Moment That Started Everything In high school, I joined FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America), competed in a website design competition, and placed second. Not first...Second. And I'm telling you, it did not matter. What I remember is seeing what I built just sitting there, being looked at, judged on its own. I made that. From scratch. It existed beca