Making The Web Personal Again

Jan 30, 2024

Oh hello, world. It’s me Wolff. Long time (code) writer for the web but seldom a contributor of my own words and thoughts. A little about me, I am a web engineer who has been working on websites and apps for the past 20 years. Some notable projects I have been fortunate enough to write code for have been the Obama 2012 American presidential reelection campaign, helping to build the world’s visual language at Noun Project, and helping to feature beautifully designed content at Apartment Therapy Media. The projects and teams I’ve worked with have helped me grow as a software engineer and developer but yet my contribution to them is not mine to own. So now it is time to change that.

Although I’ve written very little for the web, here is what got me into the business of writing code: I quickly got distracted from writing on my own early Movable Type blog in the early 2000s and started helping others design and develop their own blog themes. Quickly I was writing code more than my own words for fellow friends' blogs and MySpace pages (oh the terrible CSS hacks). I quickly lost sight of writing and shifted my focus entirely to “web design”. And the rest of my code writing career is history from there. However, my online writing, the act that got me online and developing in the first place, sadly ended there.

Instead, I opted like many others, to contribute to early Twitter and micro-blogging which felt like the future. Sharing thoughts via a text message anywhere felt like the logical next step in my digital contribution life cycle. I quickly started to rely on such third party platforms such as Twitter to boost my random thoughts and ramblings into the world wide web via hashtags, opting to publish my thoughts quickly and have them seen instantly.

Coming of age into the content powered “web 2.0” buzzwordy phase of the internet, I, like many others, quickly saw the benefits to share and contribute to content silos such as early Twitter or WordPress where user engagement was encouraged on dynamic platforms that elevated and highlighted contributors faster than we could do on our own sites. The launch of the iPhone in 2007 and the rise of “smart phone” technology allowed us faster ways to write, scribble, and share ideas on the go that didn't require us to sit down in front of a rich text editor and organize our thoughts. And it worked to great success. We were able to share what we had for breakfast that morning or current events and news instantly and in a manner that provided that instant dopamine hit of feedback. Like many others, I was hooked and never wanted to look back from the seemingly analog process of linking, sharing and creating our own content silos.

I began to value the quick community building early Twitter provided. It allowed me to give more personal and intricate details about my life as a late teen early twenty-something coming up in the “digital age”. I forgot quickly about what it was like to share more long-form thoughts via my own Movable Type blog platform and instead opted to just work to build and design platforms for others while contributing to content silos on Twitter I did not own for quick, reliable community building.

The hashtag and the contribution to content silos such as Twitter gave immense power to those of us looking to quickly build and grow online community. I myself became quickly addicted to the instant dopamine hit of feedback to my own contribution to online conversations. My interest quickly shifted from sharing long form written words to sharing thoughts and notes to friends on social media platforms and the emerging web technologies such as AJAX moved me further and further into the code of the world wide web and farther away from the written word that comprised it.

Somewhere in the digital utopia of the 2010s I forgot about the the “why” I write for the web and instead began to focus on the “how”. How could I make web apps more dynamic (better), faster smarter (quoth Daft Punk 🌈). Filling my day with other’s software development problems of serving feeds curated by algorithms became far more interesting than serving and curating my own thoughts. With the rapid march of adoption of web standards and the rise of the web application there was hardly a second to stop and reflect. It was go time. I was helping write the code of the future or so I felt.

But in this euphoria of the “digital age” of web apps and platforms I lost the connection to why I write code and words for the web. It was easier to solve problems that were not mine than contribute and share thoughts of my own. This resulted in many wonderful opportunities for me but sadly left me with very little of my own personal touches of the web to share and own.

So this is my own acknowledgment of my need to return to my roots. To return to the web as a contributor of my own written word and code. A promise to myself to be true to who I am as a content creator on the web and bring me back some of the joy that got me here in the first place. I am here to share and explore in a way that hopefully will allow me to find some balance of facilitation of content and my own active participation in online discourse.

So here I am. Fourteen years into my professional web development career feeling ever more ready to reconnect with myself and what motivates me as a writer of code and works. I’m thankful for the last decade+ of professional code writing but I acknowledge I have been missing my own magic sauce that makes the web personal to me. So here I am. Just a human in front of a computer rediscovering what it means to be a contributor, a writer for and of the web. Hello World. Nice to meet you again.