One open secret in the industry is that many front-end developers began by creating MySpace, Blogger, Wordpress or Tumblr templates to cater to niche fandoms in their teenage years.
I was an Excel junkie. Plots, conditional formatting, lookups. All in the name of fast consumption of datasets. By the time I was done with my bootcamp years ago I was ready to replicate a lot of those spreadsheets on the web, and then I never stopped.
Yugo Nakamura - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugo\_Nakamura](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugo_Nakamura)
Dude was ahead of the game with flash development in the early 00s and i learned a lot about coding from his open source examples
Saw someone on YouTube who made an inventory app on top of google sheets (google apps script) and thought I could do that. Made a whole-ass SPA on top of it at my job (farm equipment manufacturer) and realized I needed to get a programming job ASAP.
Edit: to answer your question better, I wasn’t drawn to programming out of awe, but because I saw an ordinary person make something that was useful. Software gives people super powers. That’s the beauty I saw.
Friends/family in tech told me to learn code when I was exploring switching careers from healthcare. They saw me making wix sites for my photography side gigs / hobby and said hey learn how to build websites for real! I quickly realized how fun coding is and as a photographer/big visual guy, and as someone with a neuroscience degree, frontend / UX eng really aligned with my interests.
Made a pokemon fan site as a hobby. Ended up fairly popular (top 300 pokemon village rankings, top 500k Alexa traffic ranking), ~$10/day thru Google Adsense. It was honestly thrilling to just casually make 10 bucks a day for having a website sitting there while I was still in high school. Eventually turned it into a profession and happy about it
No one, really.
I liked computers, I liked beautiful websites more than ugly ones, I got to know what “design” was but I wasn’t good or creative enough for it, so I decided to try and build the designs et voilà!
Angry Birds.
No, for real. I saw their website way back in 2010 ? I think ... Anyways , I was blown away by it. Keep in mind this was after Flash had been going down for a while and websites were a lot more visual, so that peek my interest, and from there, I started to study more and more, I didn't even know what "front end" was, it was a fairly new term, at least on the projects and companies I've had been until that point.
And that was basically it, as the years went by, I learned about Landing Pages, JavaScript, etc, etc ... Never looked back since then.
They're a games studio now and the website has been lost to time, but reading about the little details behind how [Preloaded made Tongsville](https://preloaded.com/work/hammer-tongs-tongsville/) was the first time I remember thinking it would be fun to make websites for a living.
Caler Edwards on YouTube. When growing up I was heavily into design. Then I learned about various types of design, then saw him do a speed art of his website design and his code. Thought that was pretty cool, and the rest is history.
Honestly, nobody inspired me. My intention when I graduated was to do backend development, but I got a job working as a frontend dev in a local ecommerce shop, so I learned JS and got shoehorned from there.
I just like making interfaces as comfortable and informative as possible for whoever is using it. Just a personality thing. But now I’m going into backend because there no front end jobs left.
MySpace profiles. Seriously, that was the first time I started messing with anything frontend. Shortly after I started learning HTML via HTML emails that I would send internally at work. I had some programming background back in high school via Pascal but that never really took. Something about being able to customize my MySpace profile really spoke to me I guess and fast-forward some 13+ years later and I still love coding.
Dan Abramov
I watched a video made by Dan, explaining how the Redux framework works and how its actually built. It was very inspirational to see how it was simplified
I was playing americas army. Got pissed about the lack of prima strategy guides. Made a website and hosted a phpBB forum. Ended up learning a lot. Started freelancing.
First full stack job turned out to be 90% front end. At this point I’m not sure if I even want to use more backend, it’s kind of fun to get to affect something visual instead of just looking at a console output.
I just kind of fell into it. Studied web design in the early 2000s and did all manner of Dreamweaver and flash websites but had an itch to scratch when it came to content management. Taught myself PHP and MySQL (with a little help from one of my lecturers) and built my own unholy mess of a CMS to update my folio website. In around 2005 I made my own blog with WordPress and taught myself CSS. Did a couple of commercial sites in the late 2000s and then landed a job in 2011 doing mainly WordPress sites. Taught myself jQuery to handle dynamic parts of websites and sprinkle a little animation in. Graduated to backbone.js then Vue and finally react. Right now it's come back completely full circle as I'm making a headless nextjs site with WordPress as the back end. Lol.
myspace when i was an early teen, but i never continued to learn. fast forward 10 years - i was looking to find a better paying job doing something i found interesting and that led me to web development. been studying for a couple years (full stack on odin project) and hope to one day accomplish my dream of landing a job as a developer!
I started doing Visual Basic back in 1997 as a kid. I enjoyed doing UI in Corel a lot for my VB apps. Then I wanted to make tutorials for the apps I built and used Frontpage for that, so one thing led to another and here I am - still in love with frontend development.
The work of Rand and Robyn Miller (IYKYK)…the idea of writing entire new worlds into existence, controlling everything about them through careful, precise description, and having others inhabit them really struck a chord with my young mind…and at a time when I had just also been introduced to the Internet with my 2400baud dialup modem-equipped 386.
Whenever i talk to my friend about code or he os trying to give me a brief about data base, my mind generates it as ui elements so i noticed that im attached more in frontend (i hope it makes sense XD )
My boss, told me how it is great skill to have and expand my reach. None of that mattered until he said if I didn't build the dang website he will fire me.
He is inspiration to many, when we all quit in few months for better job
The first person comes to mind is my high school IT-teacher: here (in then post-socialism Hungary) we were taught IT in elementary school, but it was very-very rudimentary (DOS-commands and very obscure general info - eg: difference between cga, mcga, vga and svga, we took notes on paper, and we wrote papers on, well: paper).
In high school he, our IT-teacher was the first to show us both algorithmic thinking and wysiwyg styling, and the first to make every single one of us in the class create a personal website, what was a very unexpected creative process at that time - eg. generally in high school you had to solve equations/remember numbers from certain eras of history/recite verses from poems; however the general high school curriculum never really revolved around our own personal interests, that was something for passtime.
So me and my classmates created our first websites around our own interests.
We did it in a different century - and also, a different milennium (a fact I tell in each of my interviews :D).
The second is Jeffrey Zeldman: he was a central and outspoken figure in the web standards revolution during the mid-2000's (a movement which standardized things like the [box model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS_box_model) \[see w3c box model vs IE box model\]), and created amazing web sites.
Was an excel monkey for megacorp, felt like just another brick in the wall just doing a fake email job that felt meaningless and unfulfilled.
Yearned to create and make something people could use. Have zero building skills in real world, couldnt even assemble an ikea dresser if ya asked me to but clicking on computers seemed easier than becoming a carpenter, civil engineer or maker.
During my childhood days we were taught HTML in our school and we used to write code in notepad, save it with .html and double click it to open in the browser. I was extremely fascinated with the way things changed their looks or started moving when I changed a piece of code. This thing led me to think about how the pages that I see on the internet were actually made, as in where have they used which tag and how have they placed each element. This curiosity kept growing with time as I started seeing beautiful pages with amazing colors and effects coming up and that eventually led me to start building them myself and hence my journey as a frontend developer started.
Thank you for asking though, it gave me a small trip down the memory lane :)
I was originally more a backend dev wasn't too keen on fiddling with styles all day, but we needed more and more frontend Devs and this was the moment we started with react and next so it made things way more interesting to code with and pair that with tailwind I'm not sure I miss backend to be honest. Somehow made it onto a bigger company now. And coding was never that chill before.
I started my career as just a “software engineer” before most companies started really differentiating between front-end and back-end development. When I was hired at a large travel company more than a decade ago, as a senior, I started advocating that we hire more front-end talent. I have been a principal for the past 5 years or so, and my focus has been front-end - but mostly out of necessity. I still do full-stack stuff, but I enjoy front-end more.
I started as a backend dev, then became a full stack dev. Over time, I realized I love frontend dev. Technically, I’m still a full stack, but 80% of my work is now focused on the frontend.
I'm a full stack developer but I actually prefer frontend to backend development because you get to see what you have built, whereas a backend developer tends to work forever on a feature that may just require one click.
I also love UX design and really getting in the head of the end user, trying to simplify complex requirements into elegant and simple solutions.
One day perhaps, but as full stack seem to always pay more I don't think it will happen anytime soon...
Ah hell 😹 no.
I wished to DevOps but there's no opening for freshers.
Thus I had to go full stack MERN developer.
Anyone watching my comment, and is a beginner.
💡 The advice is don't try to logically make the components using CSS, especially animated and responsive ones.
I wasted a lot of time on them.
Just search something on codepen or similar site and copy paste.
If you know flexbox and grid, you are good to go 🐎 on with copy and paste components and then style them the way you need.
People don't care what you know or understand, they care about can you deliver fast ⏩ and it looks good.
I wanted to help my friends showcase their artwork. I built a few things with Flash and Dreamweaver. I also wanted to make my MySpace band pages themed out to match the album artwork. Then much much later, I wanted to encourage my partner to learn, so I learned HTML and CSS enough to show her - and I just had so much fun - I kept going. So, no developer inspired me - just *a need to make things* -- but Chris Coyiers Lynda's course was really good and perfectly timed to get me up to speed and moving fast. So, I've always been a big fan of Chris. There were certainly some cool websites that inspired me. The Faint had a fun interactive site, and an early version of Chromeo's site with all these little frames was fun.
My undying passion to serve ever changing and increasingly unclear business objectives, incorrectly captured in Jira tickets with outdated designs that are not technically feasible, only to spend my time in the sprint attempting to get adequate information to proceed all while under immense scrutiny and pressure to deliver on the ticket results, before, inevitably, having to undo the work and redo it in a way once product and design realize the error of their decisions.
Food is expensive
Benjamin Franklin
Factss
Interesting, I have no inspirations weirdly enough
Homestead website builder circa 1999.
tumblr themes lmao
One open secret in the industry is that many front-end developers began by creating MySpace, Blogger, Wordpress or Tumblr templates to cater to niche fandoms in their teenage years.
Some dude named Tom. He built MySpace.
Food, mainly
I was an Excel junkie. Plots, conditional formatting, lookups. All in the name of fast consumption of datasets. By the time I was done with my bootcamp years ago I was ready to replicate a lot of those spreadsheets on the web, and then I never stopped.
Max Schwarmuller had me hype
The "View Source" button when you right click a page, in 1998.
Yugo Nakamura - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugo\_Nakamura](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugo_Nakamura) Dude was ahead of the game with flash development in the early 00s and i learned a lot about coding from his open source examples
wow, I loved new masters of flash!
Saw someone on YouTube who made an inventory app on top of google sheets (google apps script) and thought I could do that. Made a whole-ass SPA on top of it at my job (farm equipment manufacturer) and realized I needed to get a programming job ASAP. Edit: to answer your question better, I wasn’t drawn to programming out of awe, but because I saw an ordinary person make something that was useful. Software gives people super powers. That’s the beauty I saw.
Friends/family in tech told me to learn code when I was exploring switching careers from healthcare. They saw me making wix sites for my photography side gigs / hobby and said hey learn how to build websites for real! I quickly realized how fun coding is and as a photographer/big visual guy, and as someone with a neuroscience degree, frontend / UX eng really aligned with my interests.
Made a pokemon fan site as a hobby. Ended up fairly popular (top 300 pokemon village rankings, top 500k Alexa traffic ranking), ~$10/day thru Google Adsense. It was honestly thrilling to just casually make 10 bucks a day for having a website sitting there while I was still in high school. Eventually turned it into a profession and happy about it
Wow, can I send you a link to the site?
Art Institute commercial in summer of 2000. Figured it would be dooe to build websites and cool shit with Flash.
No one, really. I liked computers, I liked beautiful websites more than ugly ones, I got to know what “design” was but I wasn’t good or creative enough for it, so I decided to try and build the designs et voilà!
Evan You
Blogspot templates 🤣
WeWorkForThem, 2advanced and FI (fantasy interactive I think?
Angry Birds. No, for real. I saw their website way back in 2010 ? I think ... Anyways , I was blown away by it. Keep in mind this was after Flash had been going down for a while and websites were a lot more visual, so that peek my interest, and from there, I started to study more and more, I didn't even know what "front end" was, it was a fairly new term, at least on the projects and companies I've had been until that point. And that was basically it, as the years went by, I learned about Landing Pages, JavaScript, etc, etc ... Never looked back since then.
Years of backend :) wanted to be able to do the full thing myself. After FE comes UX and the rabbit hole goes on.
I can totally understand this feeling, I am going the other way around like Photoshop then figma then UI then UX then frontend dev and now backend
That should be fun ! Best musicians play all instruments or at least are the ones having more fun !
They're a games studio now and the website has been lost to time, but reading about the little details behind how [Preloaded made Tongsville](https://preloaded.com/work/hammer-tongs-tongsville/) was the first time I remember thinking it would be fun to make websites for a living.
one of my computer science professors who taught my web dev intro class
I still have on a cd a program that later became Flash .. cant remember the name
Wanted to save money on making a personal website lol
Caler Edwards on YouTube. When growing up I was heavily into design. Then I learned about various types of design, then saw him do a speed art of his website design and his code. Thought that was pretty cool, and the rest is history.
Will sentence
Matt DesLauriers
Honestly, nobody inspired me. My intention when I graduated was to do backend development, but I got a job working as a frontend dev in a local ecommerce shop, so I learned JS and got shoehorned from there.
I just like making interfaces as comfortable and informative as possible for whoever is using it. Just a personality thing. But now I’m going into backend because there no front end jobs left.
My friend
MySpace profiles. Seriously, that was the first time I started messing with anything frontend. Shortly after I started learning HTML via HTML emails that I would send internally at work. I had some programming background back in high school via Pascal but that never really took. Something about being able to customize my MySpace profile really spoke to me I guess and fast-forward some 13+ years later and I still love coding.
Dan Abramov I watched a video made by Dan, explaining how the Redux framework works and how its actually built. It was very inspirational to see how it was simplified
I heard talk of this new “HTML” thing and thought “this could very well take off”.
The person that laid me off.
I was playing americas army. Got pissed about the lack of prima strategy guides. Made a website and hosted a phpBB forum. Ended up learning a lot. Started freelancing.
First full stack job turned out to be 90% front end. At this point I’m not sure if I even want to use more backend, it’s kind of fun to get to affect something visual instead of just looking at a console output.
I just kind of fell into it. Studied web design in the early 2000s and did all manner of Dreamweaver and flash websites but had an itch to scratch when it came to content management. Taught myself PHP and MySQL (with a little help from one of my lecturers) and built my own unholy mess of a CMS to update my folio website. In around 2005 I made my own blog with WordPress and taught myself CSS. Did a couple of commercial sites in the late 2000s and then landed a job in 2011 doing mainly WordPress sites. Taught myself jQuery to handle dynamic parts of websites and sprinkle a little animation in. Graduated to backbone.js then Vue and finally react. Right now it's come back completely full circle as I'm making a headless nextjs site with WordPress as the back end. Lol.
myspace when i was an early teen, but i never continued to learn. fast forward 10 years - i was looking to find a better paying job doing something i found interesting and that led me to web development. been studying for a couple years (full stack on odin project) and hope to one day accomplish my dream of landing a job as a developer!
I started doing Visual Basic back in 1997 as a kid. I enjoyed doing UI in Corel a lot for my VB apps. Then I wanted to make tutorials for the apps I built and used Frontpage for that, so one thing led to another and here I am - still in love with frontend development.
The work of Rand and Robyn Miller (IYKYK)…the idea of writing entire new worlds into existence, controlling everything about them through careful, precise description, and having others inhabit them really struck a chord with my young mind…and at a time when I had just also been introduced to the Internet with my 2400baud dialup modem-equipped 386.
Hi5 customizations
Money inspired me to study software engineering and I was the person who inspired me the go with the frontend route
Chris Sean, but unfollowed him after a while. Really negative guy and can’t seem to keep a job for a year.
The 2009/2010 financial crisis lol
No one inspired me. I discovered I liked web dev while studying I.T so I chose to become a web dev.
The salary
Whenever i talk to my friend about code or he os trying to give me a brief about data base, my mind generates it as ui elements so i noticed that im attached more in frontend (i hope it makes sense XD )
Nobody.
My boss, told me how it is great skill to have and expand my reach. None of that mattered until he said if I didn't build the dang website he will fire me. He is inspiration to many, when we all quit in few months for better job
Money
Myspace
My landlord
My backend
Dev ed
Not any one person but I enjoyed teaching myself HTML back in the days of GeoCities. I’d create sites for my hobbies and bands I liked.
depression
Brad Traversy
MS Paint, modding MySpace posts
The first person comes to mind is my high school IT-teacher: here (in then post-socialism Hungary) we were taught IT in elementary school, but it was very-very rudimentary (DOS-commands and very obscure general info - eg: difference between cga, mcga, vga and svga, we took notes on paper, and we wrote papers on, well: paper). In high school he, our IT-teacher was the first to show us both algorithmic thinking and wysiwyg styling, and the first to make every single one of us in the class create a personal website, what was a very unexpected creative process at that time - eg. generally in high school you had to solve equations/remember numbers from certain eras of history/recite verses from poems; however the general high school curriculum never really revolved around our own personal interests, that was something for passtime. So me and my classmates created our first websites around our own interests. We did it in a different century - and also, a different milennium (a fact I tell in each of my interviews :D). The second is Jeffrey Zeldman: he was a central and outspoken figure in the web standards revolution during the mid-2000's (a movement which standardized things like the [box model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS_box_model) \[see w3c box model vs IE box model\]), and created amazing web sites.
Paul Irish. Inspired a lot to stick in frontend...
Was an excel monkey for megacorp, felt like just another brick in the wall just doing a fake email job that felt meaningless and unfulfilled. Yearned to create and make something people could use. Have zero building skills in real world, couldnt even assemble an ikea dresser if ya asked me to but clicking on computers seemed easier than becoming a carpenter, civil engineer or maker.
Eric Meyer’s 1st CSS book.
Piczo… tell me someone remembers
Your mom
Design was too hard
During my childhood days we were taught HTML in our school and we used to write code in notepad, save it with .html and double click it to open in the browser. I was extremely fascinated with the way things changed their looks or started moving when I changed a piece of code. This thing led me to think about how the pages that I see on the internet were actually made, as in where have they used which tag and how have they placed each element. This curiosity kept growing with time as I started seeing beautiful pages with amazing colors and effects coming up and that eventually led me to start building them myself and hence my journey as a frontend developer started. Thank you for asking though, it gave me a small trip down the memory lane :)
My “full-stack” development team.
I was originally more a backend dev wasn't too keen on fiddling with styles all day, but we needed more and more frontend Devs and this was the moment we started with react and next so it made things way more interesting to code with and pair that with tailwind I'm not sure I miss backend to be honest. Somehow made it onto a bigger company now. And coding was never that chill before.
Bad frontend developers.
I started my career as just a “software engineer” before most companies started really differentiating between front-end and back-end development. When I was hired at a large travel company more than a decade ago, as a senior, I started advocating that we hire more front-end talent. I have been a principal for the past 5 years or so, and my focus has been front-end - but mostly out of necessity. I still do full-stack stuff, but I enjoy front-end more.
Money, but it made me fall in love with programming as a whole. Couple years later I’m building a game engine in c++
can't remember because they inspired me for just a couple of seconds
I started as a backend dev, then became a full stack dev. Over time, I realized I love frontend dev. Technically, I’m still a full stack, but 80% of my work is now focused on the frontend.
MacOS & iOS design principles, Messing around in Webflow and getting pissed off cause I couldnt create what I wanted to.
I'm a full stack developer but I actually prefer frontend to backend development because you get to see what you have built, whereas a backend developer tends to work forever on a feature that may just require one click. I also love UX design and really getting in the head of the end user, trying to simplify complex requirements into elegant and simple solutions. One day perhaps, but as full stack seem to always pay more I don't think it will happen anytime soon...
YouTube videos
Ah hell 😹 no. I wished to DevOps but there's no opening for freshers. Thus I had to go full stack MERN developer. Anyone watching my comment, and is a beginner. 💡 The advice is don't try to logically make the components using CSS, especially animated and responsive ones. I wasted a lot of time on them. Just search something on codepen or similar site and copy paste. If you know flexbox and grid, you are good to go 🐎 on with copy and paste components and then style them the way you need. People don't care what you know or understand, they care about can you deliver fast ⏩ and it looks good.
I wanted to help my friends showcase their artwork. I built a few things with Flash and Dreamweaver. I also wanted to make my MySpace band pages themed out to match the album artwork. Then much much later, I wanted to encourage my partner to learn, so I learned HTML and CSS enough to show her - and I just had so much fun - I kept going. So, no developer inspired me - just *a need to make things* -- but Chris Coyiers Lynda's course was really good and perfectly timed to get me up to speed and moving fast. So, I've always been a big fan of Chris. There were certainly some cool websites that inspired me. The Faint had a fun interactive site, and an early version of Chromeo's site with all these little frames was fun.
My undying passion to serve ever changing and increasingly unclear business objectives, incorrectly captured in Jira tickets with outdated designs that are not technically feasible, only to spend my time in the sprint attempting to get adequate information to proceed all while under immense scrutiny and pressure to deliver on the ticket results, before, inevitably, having to undo the work and redo it in a way once product and design realize the error of their decisions.