DEV Community

Cover image for Did MySpace Get You Interested in Coding?
TJ Wright
TJ Wright

Posted on

Did MySpace Get You Interested in Coding?

One thing that I keep seeing over and over again...
a generation of developers inspired by... MYSPACE.

If that's you, I want to hear about it!

Did you go to school for development, are you attending a boot camp, are you totally self-taught? What do you do now? What was your favorite MySpace memory? Share your story!

tom from myspace

the face that launched a thousand coders

Top comments (8)

Collapse
 
frontenddude profile image
Frontend Dude πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’»

I started around the MySpace time and it was definitely a part of my coding journey. I remember slicing PSDs up in photoshop, uploading them to imageshack and using html to style profiles. I was popular with all my friends and local bands as I could make them look cool online haha!

Collapse
 
wrightdotclick profile image
TJ Wright

Imageshack and Geocities were life back then πŸ˜‚

Collapse
 
frontenddude profile image
Frontend Dude πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’»

It took me about 5 mins to remember imageshack but damn it was amazing.

Collapse
 
kelvinmai profile image
Kelvin Mai

I remember hacking a bit at MySpace, it was my first exposure to code, but it didn't really interest me at the time because I was more interested in game dev than web. But when I started doing computer science classes in college I took a small web class and was thinking this was super familiar.

Collapse
 
wrightdotclick profile image
TJ Wright • Edited

MySpace popped up around the same time I was dabbling in some MMORPGs that had some limited development built into them (Furcadia, anyone?). Within a few weeks, I taught myself CSS/HTML and was customizing my friends pages for them. I didn't go on to a career in development, but it stuck with me.

I'm now doing a bootcamp at Flatiron School, and I'm surprised by how much I still remember from the good ole' MySpace days. πŸ˜‚ I can't tell you how many times I've typed <i> and <b> instead of the preferred <em> <strong> because of MySpace habits from when I was like 11 years old...

Collapse
 
heatherhaylett profile image
Heather

Absolutely! I loved being able to change the layout, colors, and if people were able to see my top 8. I don't think I realized at the time how magical HTML was, but it definitely felt cool to make my page my own.

I'm 4 weeks away from graduating an immersive software engineering boot camp and I can say for sure that without MySpace I would have never found my way here.

Collapse
 
rowedahelicon profile image
β­πŸŒ•πŸŒŸ Rowedahelicon 🌻

Gosh, I suppose I never considered this. I remember some of the earliest work I did was customizing my Myspace profile to look super neat. I was really bad at it, but I must have loved it enough to keep going.

Collapse
 
emma profile image
Emma Goto πŸ™

It was Neopets for me, actually! I remember printing out HTML tutorials and "studying" them as a kid πŸ˜