Interdependence 2024

At church, prior to Thanksgiving the service had a theme of interdependence. The pastor shared an exercise in preparing for Thanksgiving where you try to think of something you love and what helped you foster that enjoyment. I did a Web Development one and wanted to share. It is supposed to be six degrees of separation from then to now. I think I could share a lot more connections but these ones seem to be the first that bubbled into my mind.

  1. My parents for bringing computers into the home and for letting me take apart whatever was in the recycle area behind our local Radio Shack. I still don't understand how VCRs translate something on tape to video.
  2. A family work acquaintance who taught me how to build computers and for a copy of Visual Studio C++. This is when I was in high school and I just thought computer programming was so cool. I made quite a few zork type games with C++. They were only a few turns each but it was fun. It also helped me figure out my high school senior project of creating a mod for the PC game Deus Ex.
  3. My high school counselor who let me take an independent study Ziff Davis HTML course. I had to buy the course and work through paper work books. It was awesome. This was at the change from HTML 3 to HTML 4. CSS was becoming a thing, the end of table based layout was near, though still years from embracing it.
  4. My college for trusting the proposal my friends and I made to work for their IT department in exchange for room and board my junior and senior year. I helped make their new website in XHTML. I wouldn’t have been able to finish college without that. CSS Zen Garden was a constant experimentation playground and A List Apart was read with awe.
  5. My first boss outside of college for taking a chance on me.
  6. The developers of Ubercart; this fostered my exploration of Drupal right after Drupal 5 and made me really fall back in love with web development. I had been burnt out between the first job out of college and working at Lane Community College and the UO.

Past this grouping of interdependence, there are so many others. The Drupal community, the Linux community, clients of mine when I was actively freelancing, co-workers and colleagues everywhere I have ever worked, and for all that makes the world go round.

Happy Thanksgiving!