Valentine Erb's Blog

I graduated from the University of Rhode Island in 1999 with my B.S. in Business Administration. I’m still a young guy and that doesn’t sound like so long ago, but consider the following. Windows 98 was the newest OS for PC’s and Netscape was the dominant browser. Things we take for granted today like WiFi and iPods were years away and it was entirely normal not to have a cell phone. Google.com had just been registered the previous semester and Napster debuted that summer. There was no YouTube or Wikipedia or “blogging” for that matter (it was still called a weblog, but not a lot of people knew that then either). The web was no more than 10% of its current size, so becoming a developer didn’t exactly jump out at me as a career choice. Sure, I had been using computers most of my life and I was even installing corporate networks during summer “vacation”, but while I had a serious premonition that soon I’d be doing a lot with the web, it wasn’t at all clear to me how exactly that would come about; I was on the management track, not computer science.

(more…)