Web development has come a long way over the past couple of decades. I can remember designing in Microsoft Publisher (yeah that’s right, Publisher!) and then taking its output files to an FTP program to be uploaded to Tripod, back when member sites were preceded with a tilde (~). I remember thinking I was hardcore writing my markup in Notepad, <UPPERCASE> tags and all. Better yet, I remember using HTML as a means to trick the browser into displaying my content as I wanted.

Fast-forward to 2014 and you’ll find developers using a slew of technologies including HTML5, SCSS, PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript and jQuery, frameworks such as AngularJS, and even entirely new languages e.g., Dart. The development ecosystem is very healthy.

Here is where things really begin to get interesting. As the Web continues to grow as a medium through which untold numbers of people share information and connect to worlds outside their own, more platforms will continue to move to the Web. Mobile devices and much more capable browsers are enabling great advances in the way we share data. These other platforms have brought ideas of modularity and reusability to a once very static world. And now, with frameworks such as AngularJS, we are being acquainted with Model View Controller (MVC), which compartmentalizes one’s data model, view template, and controllers into separate files for testing and code reusability.

With ES6 on its way and the idea of web components beginning to be more mainstream, I see the realization—at least to a small degree—of Tim Berners-Lee’s idea of a semantic Web. And although ES6 isn’t fully standardized yet, we can use awesome tools such as Angular directives. Directives are custom HTML elements that can add meaning to a document, and since a developer has gone to the trouble of abstracting this data out into modules or components, such useful semantic meaning can be reused throughout an application.

I’m more than excited to be developing in this modern ecosystem and feel the Web is where everything is moving towards, and for good reason!

I changed my major for a third time at the junior college level and began my anthropological journey at the prestigious Santa Rosa Junior College in Northern California. Immediately I found that cultural anthropology was what I had been searching for. Here is a field in which participant observation, historical particularism, cultural relativity, and postmodernism, among others, are all toolsets employed to better understand how people and their institutions work.

I see the Web as being extremely useful in this regard, and would offer as a metaphor the story of the fish being asked to describe it’s environment. A fish would, if at all, describe water lastly as water exists in such abundance for the fish. It is through contrast that we are most able to identify features and patterns which would have otherwise been unnoticed, and this is just one instance in which anthropology can prove to be quite beneficial. Such thinking tends to bleed, for me at least, into a certain philosophical perspective that sees the Web as a lens through which countless features and patterns can be identified, and that’s damn exciting!

My first exposure to code was through Microsoft Visual Basic and some simple calculator tutorials I worked on with my dad, I can still remember their excessively bland designs. This was the early 1990s and although the Web was beginning to gain ground as a popular medium for information sharing, it was nothing like it is in 2014. It was in 1997 when I first learned that someone, anyone, could make a website of their own. I had been spending my lunch hour with a group of friends in our science teacher’s classroom when he asked if we wanted to see the world’s smallest website. He had a simple landing page comprised of a white background with a single pixel near the center of the tiny screen, he moused over the pixel and clicked to enter another page explaining how the previous page represented the smallest of websites. Needless to say, I was floored. “You mean I can make a website myself and just put it online?!” I was hooked and have been ever since.

However, life isn’t a simple one-way street and my interests began to spread. I started to become more and more interested in mathematics, physics, and science in general. All the while, though, still maintaining a certain level of interest and desire to work with the Web. I began college as a Computer Science major immediately after leaving the US Army Signals Intelligence Corps. Eventually I switched majors to Physics and began envisioning myself as a theoretical physicist. Fortunately for me that changed and I soon discovered Anthropology and started to see how I could benefit greatly from this balanced approach.

I think Ghost is definitely interesting, but I already prefer writing on Medium. Nothing against “blogging,” per se, I just enjoy the more fundamental shifts in communication being exposed by tools such as Twitter and Medium. Though I can see Ghost becoming the tool one seeks out when needing to maintain a larger blog.

This is such an elegant and simple process! I would imagine the name, Medium, has at least two meanings—namely a medium through which information is shared at astronomical rates, and two, a medium ground between lengthy blog posts and a very terse 140 character limit. I applaud the folks at Obvious for such an obviously great and necessary product.