The professionalization of web development has been a difficult journey because of our disparate beginnings. Even those who end up at large companies such as Yahoo! inevitably began on their own, hacking around. Perhaps you were even “the web guy” at a small company and could do pretty much whatever you wanted. When the large companies started tapping this previously undiscovered resource, it brought a lot of hackers into a corporate environment, where they were met with constraints. No longer a lone soldier in a small battle, all of these self-taught, self-directed individuals had to figure out how to work within a team environment.

I learned JavaScript the way many did in the late 1990s: I taught myself. Because Java- Script was so new, educational resources were scarce. I, like many other developers, learned by exploring the intricacies of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator on my own. I experimented, theorized, and experimented again until I discovered how things worked. Luckily for me, this curiosity and diligence turned into my first job. For the first five years of my professional career, I was “the JavaScript guy.” No one in either of my first two companies could match my depth of knowledge in JavaScript and web development in general. All problems, from very simple to very difficult, ended up on my desk to solve by myself. It was both empowering as a fresh-from-college kid and terrifying because I had no one to bounce ideas off of or anyone to ask for help if I got stuck. I did the best that I could, knowing that I was the only one who could do it.

During those five years, I honed my craft. I came up with ways of doing things that made sense to me and my workflow. I didn’t have to worry about what anyone else thought of my code, because no one had enough knowledge to code review or fix what I had written. I was a hacker in its purest sense: I wrote code the way I wanted and wouldn’t hear of changing it.