It occurred to me last night that I’ve been building websites, either professionally or as a hobby, for over 20 years now! I built my first website in a computer class in the 6th grade using nothing more than a text editor and trial & error. Things have come a long ways since then.

In college I learned Macromedia Dreamweaver and Macromedia Flash. My first software job was all about Sublime Text 2 and ExtJS. Now when I mention most of those things I get looks of confusion.

Everyone seems to be caught up in the rat race of popularity and fandom. Who has the most GitHub stars? What did insert popular developer tweet that they like or dislike? I like to think that I’m above these behaviors, but I know I fall for the same trappings as everyone else.

Given all that, I think it’d be prudent of me to take a step back and assess why I use the tools I do and why I don’t use the other tools available to me. Hopefully I’ll learn something along the way.