Intersecting Interests

This post is part of February’s IndieWeb Carnival on the theme of “Intersecting Interests” being hosted by Zachary Kai:

For this month's carnival, write about where your interests intersect. That might be a single unexpected overlap, a whole ecosystem, or the thread that ties parts of your life together.

Well, where do I start? This entire site—a portfolio of my visual artwork created with lines of my code—is an intersection of interests.

Back in December I wrote about the way the early internet service providers such as Demon Internet gave their customers a small plot of web space:

I seem to remember it was about 5 or 10 MB of web space where you could host images and static HTML (there may have been a cgi-bin directory as well) so creating a minimal web presence just involved uploading a hand-crafted index.html file to your subdomain.

…and that’s where this site was first hosted from 1996 to 2000. But let me tell you a story about how I got there.

I graduated with an art degree back in 1992 and after graduation, unsurprisingly, I found that an art degree did not pay my rent—and it still doesn’t.

A few months later I got a temporary job doing some general clerical/office work that ended up lasting for about three years, and it was just at the time when typing pools were disappearing and all the middle-aged middle-managers were confronted with a big beige PC running DOS (and later Windows 3.1) appearing on their desk, which they could barely use - most of them could barely type, let alone find their way around a computer.

Now I’d had a Sinclair ZX80 followed by a Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ as a teenager, and while I could write some basic BASIC scripts I was certainly not a programmer—I spent most of my time playing Elite on it—but I did still have a curiosity about computers (which I still have) and the youthful ability to pick things up quickly (which I sadly don’t), and so within a year-or-so I was the go-to young temp worker for any questions about these beige boxes and the magic they could do.

A couple of years later I was introduced to the internet—emails, usenet, and the web—by some friends and in about 1995 I got my own 28.8KBps dial-up modem, internet connection, and the aforementioned small plot of web space, courtesy of an account with Demon Internet.

I knew then—and here’s the intersection of interests—that I wanted a website for my artwork, and since I already had the webspace from my Demon Internet account there was nothing stopping me from uploading an initial index.html file which probably featured the words “under construction”. Over the years I taught myself HTML, DHTML, PHP, SQL, CSS, and much more: the logic and science of web development seemingly at odds with the art of … well, making art with a pencil on paper.

In the decades following the first version of this website I’ve worked as a web developer, then as a manager for a team of web and software developers. Nowadays I work as a solution architect so I’m not writing as much code or HTML or CSS as I used to, but I’m still earning a living from doing techie stuff for the web. I’m still not earning a living from making artwork, but the techie job at least pays for it.