How did I end up here?

As always, it all comes back to childhood fears, but let’s start with the present. In a way, all of this feels quite Freudian. With me joining Klasse Digitale Grafik, I honestly did not think I’d end up coding. I originally joined because of my interest in graphic design and my general interest in topics related to the Internet. I knew coding was a part of this class, but I never thought I would develop such an interest in the subject of code—primarily because my emotional connection to code used to be one of fear. Over the last few years, I gradually managed to overcome this deeply rooted fear of coding. The more I overcame it, the more fun I started to have while coding my small little websites. With this, which feels like a generic progression for a person learning a new skill, I became more interested in how other websites were made. With this, my descent into the rabbit hole of web programming started to accelerate, and I think I crossed a point of no return with coding.

One of my first PC memories is sitting in front of the family PC running Windows 98, doodling in Paint. I don’t have any recollection of surfing the web at this age. This changed when I got my first Laptop in 2002—I was 10 or 11 years old at that point. With this, I also got my own connection to the Internet at some point, probably by still plugging a cable from the router into the LAN port of my Laptop. With a personal device and a connection to the Internet, I was well on my way to becoming a very online teen. With the spread of social media and microblogging in the mid-2000s, I had a cringy MySpace page and was later very active on Tumblr. Both sites allow you to customize your page or blog.⁠¹ I really enjoyed all the creativity people had with styling and personalizing their little web spaces, yet I never did that because I was terrified of coding. With MySpace, I’m not so sure how I customized it anymore, but like Tumblr, it also had a code editor. With Tumblr, however, I vividly remember this moment of opening the custom CSS panel many times and closing it again and again in fear. Ultimately, I always used themes—not that this is bad or worse in any way than doing it yourself. However, it had somewhat of a sour aftertaste for me because I always wanted to make my own stuff but could not out of fear and feelings of inadequacy. While researching this thesis and thinking about my relation to code, many memories from my childhood and early teens came back. I remembered why I used to be so afraid of coding—it was the Informationstechnischer Grundkurs I had in 2005, which was seventh grade.

I remember being taught VBA Basic, HTML with CSS, and using CorelDraw to make graphics for the website. The only other thing I remember is constantly feeling too stupid to program. “I’m not good enough at maths or logical thinking to understand what happens when I type things into the computer.” I was so happy once this course was over, and at that point, it was very clear to me that I was just too stupid to do anything with the web and coding in general. Looking back on this episode of my life and reevaluating this, I can see that is not true at all.

Berlin had a school reform in 2003, which mandated that every school had to have a focus. Our school chose a media focus and had to scramble together an informatics teacher and a course. We were the second year where this course was thought, so everything was still pretty rough. If I remember correctly, the guy who taught us was also the web admin for the school website and not a regular teacher at my school. With me now having been part of a few coding workshops and gaining some teaching experience, I realize that this whole course was not a good way to introduce new students to coding. So, all in all, many different random factors came together. My first year in a new school environment, me being a very angsty and sensitive kid, a school reform that introduced the Informationstechnischer Grundkurs the year before, and we were still being guinea pigs for this new curriculum.

Besides fear, the bad vibes I felt as a teen were another significant factor in why I never really became part of the male-dominated geek culture. Later, I would learn the concepts to understand what these bad vibes were—sexism, elitism, racism, anti-queerness, toxic masculinity, to name a few. I was mainly on Tumblr but occasionally visited places like Something Awful or 4chan to see what was happening in the abyss. When Gamergate happened in 2014, the hate reached my bubble of depressed, internet-obsessed, queer young adults on Tumblr almost instantly and radicalized me in my beliefs. Since then, I had a somewhat split perception of the Internet. I was part of heavily online communities that could make their own Internet to a certain degree, even if that was impossible for me personally. With the preconception that many people who could make websites or the Internet at large were part of a group of people I was at odds with and my general fear of code, the idea of making the Internet was very far away. Yet, I ended up coding and love making websites.

With my coding skills improving over the last two years, I’m now at the point where I have somewhat of a praxis or at least ideas about what I am doing with the medium website, how I am engaging with it, and what I want to do with it moving forward. For me personally, this has had an impact on the way I program, albeit subconsciously until recently. While searching for a topic for my thesis, I began realizing that many of the things I’m drawn to in coding are, in a way, a reconciliation with past fears of my childhood self.

I like websites with a certain warm feeling—a sort of personal character. This can apply to design and content, as well as to code or how they were made. The aspect of how it’s made started to become more pronounced the more I could code. With this, I also realized I wanted the code side of the website to have a warm and inviting feeling, as this was something I had feared and distanced myself from for such a long time.

A feeling that peeking behind the curtain of design is welcome and encouraged. Like the website that invites you in so you can spend some time with it. Or maybe like a connection to the person or people who made the website by encountering artifacts they left behind—by chance or by purpose.

Most websites I visit outside big platforms, like social media or video streaming services, are made by a single person or a tiny group of people. I enjoy getting to know these strangers, who also like making websites just by visiting the spaces they created. So, I want the same to be true when someone visits one of the websites I made. When I leave or encounter messages, notes, explanations, or other artifacts in the code of a website, they are comments. It’s one of the few ways to leave text in code that is not code itself. So, over the last few years, the comment grew very close to my heart, and in a way, I’m dedicating this text to you, dear comment. To get to know you better, understand you more, learn about your history, how you’re used, and what you mean to me. So I welcome you, dear reader, to go on this journey with me.