10 years as a web developer

01 Apr 2008 8:12 (Edited: 01 Apr 2008 8:12)

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.

Tags: 10  afterdawn  developer  new  web  years  york 

List of my blog entries

• Two days of UTF-8 happiness (23 Jan 2009)
• Moving UTF-8 encoded data from latin1 table to another latin1 table.. (20 May 2008)
• Sharding a forum database (29 Aug 2007)
• Over 100,000 suspended accounts... (12 Aug 2007)
• Holidays and weather (08 Aug 2007)
• Minor tweaks to profile pages (12 Jan 2007)
• "My links" RSS feed added (15 Aug 2006)
• Opera 9 and form enctype silliness (27 Jul 2006)
• Hectic spring is almost over... (30 Apr 2006)
• My personal thoughts about the new copyright law (27 Dec 2005)
• Added keywords, etc.. (20 Dec 2005)
• Couple of bugs fixed (19 Dec 2005)
• Net makes everything mobile? Not so... (16 Dec 2005)
• Profile pages launched as "public beta" (14 Dec 2005)
• Profile pages getting ready... (05 Dec 2005)
• Removal of pop-unders from AfterDawn.com for registered users (29 Nov 2005)

User comments

• by Ketola @ 01 Apr 2008 8:18

  Congratulations my friend. =)

• by Dela @ 01 Apr 2008 13:08

  A decade in a career... wow you're old my friend ;-) But seriously, thank you, your decision to be a web developer provided me with about 3.5 years of employment so far along with a ton of new information stored in my brain ;-)
  
  Here's to 10 more!

• by DVDBack23 @ 01 Apr 2008 13:27

  Your decision 10 years ago has led to one of the best sites on the net, congrats, and heres to 10 more :)

• by dRD @ 01 Apr 2008 16:56

  Thanks guys :-) And yes, I'm old :-)

• by LUFFYPSP @ 26 Feb 2009 2:49

  Man youre a pure legend...

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