We never had a modem at home (the call costs in the UK were ridiculous), so my first serious encounter with the Internet happened when I got to university in 1996. I spent hours in college computer rooms, falling in love with the endless reams of useless information and software which were already floating around the web.

In those days web search was a very nascent industry, and my first guide to the sea of sites was a weird little directory called “Yahoo!”. I was studying English Literature at the time, and natural nerd though I always was, if someone had told me that 7 years later I would land an engineering job with the very same Yahoo!, I would have laughed in their faces.

From Yahoo! I jumped to using Altavista, still owned by DEC at the time. And not long after, I remember the buzz of discovering my first online “meme” - the Babelfish translation service, and the hilarious things it did to texts when you translated them through successive languages and back to English.

Over the past three years I’ve been directly involved in working with all three of those early online inspirations, and it’s been an amazing experience which has taught me a great deal, allowed me to do work of which I’m truly proud, and inadvertently catapulted me 5000+ miles across the globe.

But it’s time for a slight change, and so today marks my first day working on something slightly different - as of now I am the latest engineer to join the talented and possibly slightly insane team at Flickr.

Yeah, I’m pretty excited. When I first saw flickr 20-odd months ago, I was bowled over by it, and signed up for an account pretty much on the spot. In comparison to much of the “Web 2.0″ hype-froth we’ve been enduring since, flickr just did stuff well. Yes, you could add tags to photos, and yes there was Ajax magic all over the place. But it was there to help get things done, seemingly free of pretension. Seeing flickr was my “web 2.0″ version of those first internet days back in 1996, discovering weird new sites through the Yahoo! directory and mangling classic literature in babelfish.

And if someone had told me, back when I first saw flickr, that I would eventually get the chance to work on it… well, I would have laughed in their faces.

Oh, and just so we’re clear,

• No, I can’t get you a free account.
• No, I can’t give you direct technical support on flickr problems.
• No, anything I say on hitherto.net is categorically not an opinion of flickr, flickr’s grandmothers, or Yahoo!. I speak for myself, bub.
• Yes, the uber-cool flickr feature that you really really want is probably coming, just as soon as I have time to build it.

This article first arrived on the interwebnet on Friday, September 1st, 2006 at 9:01 am .
It's arbitrarily categorised as being about: Geeking, Trends and culture.
Supernerds with RSS readers will probably wet their pants over the RSS 2.0 feed.
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