Phuh, today, despite it being April Fools' Day, marks a milestone for me, personally. Exactly ten years ago I began my career as a professional web developer. My first employer was called LPG Innovations, now-defunct web development house that became quite large player in Finland's web development market back in late '90s.
During my employment at LPG, I also started a small hobby project with seven of my friends where we could play around with various weird ideas and concepts related to web development and design, etc. That small hobby project is called AfterDawn.com.
From LPG Innovations, I pursued one of my childhood dreams and applied for a job in an overseas company (by simply emailing companies directly who I knew used the same technologies I was familiar with). That landed me to New York City in late 1999 to work for a women's website called iVillage.com. After that, I've worked for several different employers -- I moved from NYC to London back in 2001 and stayed there for almost four years until I returned back to Finland to start running AfterDawn as my main job. Until then, AfterDawn had been run by me and my friends as an "expensive hobby project" -- all coding, news output, etc was done during the spare time we had left after work, family life, etc.
But after 10 years, my web development job has grown to a project that nowadays employs handful of guys and runs this monster that we like to call our baby. AfterDawn.
Congratulations my friend. =)
