Blog Post for a Talk

Getting to know the web

To kick things off, I totally agree with Sophie's mindset of ”you need to learn the basics first“. Jumping straight into a framework, or vibe coding your way through will only get you so far. Such attempts often fall short in various ways, because best practices, coding standards, performance or accessibility optimizations, etc. are disregarded simply for lack of expertise in these fundamentals.

Exploring the internet

I remember Christmas back in 2008, when I got my first laptop from my grandfather. Amazingly, my family already had wifi at home by then. It didn't take long for me to start experimenting with personal website builders/providers - in 2010, I was using ”nPage“ (because ”Google Sites“ had failed to satisfy my needs, but I did switch to ”Jimdo“ later) to create a collection of Adobe Flash based games. My friends liked it, so I kept trying out new things, like creating a wiki for all the items of ”BrickForce“ (a game I used to play), or a helpful list of tips and tricks for Apple devices (I was fascinated by the iPad when it was introduced). Unfortunately, all those pages are lost by now - I never considered archiving/saving them.

The current state

One thing that stood out to me was Sophie mentioning ”what's wrong with the current state of the web“. Don't get me wrong, I do agree that there's problems which need fixing and should be addressed (like how I cannot, for the love of god, seem to find the opening hours and a menu on what seems like 9/10 restaurant websites). All jokes aside, I believe that the web will always keep moving in some direction. I evolves, changes, improves in certain regards and gets worse in other aspects. But crucially, it stays being dynamic. The early web was never perfect either (or so I would at least assume, not that I was around in 1994). And neither will the web ever be perfect in the future. But it can keep being engaging, fun, annoying, informative, and so much more. This interactive form of media we have created is capable of so many things. Let silly sites be one of them!

”Build your own website. Make it fun. Make it pointless. Make it YOURS.“

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I would personally love to see the internet go back to being in a state where people just create things they are passionate about, purely without commercial interest. Be it a blog, portfolio, minigame or just some silly joke project. Perhaps we should be asking: Can't these things just coexist with all the other stuff?