anthony galvin

25 years ago this week I started working at what was then known as a 'web agency'. I started off as the 'work experience' kid - I suppose today I would have been an intern.

Quickly that became a part-time and then a full time job. The dot com boom was still in full swing. I didn't know a lot, but I bought a book on building websites from the computer section of Foyles on Charing Cross road. The 'internet' section didn't even fill a whole shelf. So much about technology and building websites has changed since 1999.

But amazingly many of the fundamentals I started to learn about on that first day (between making cups of tea), remain true today.

1/ Good design makes complex things appear simple. But simple is unbelievably difficult to achieve

2/ Thinking about the end user as a real person really helps - the best way to achieve this is to talk to some of your users regularly

3/ Readable code beats 'clever code' 99% of the time - leave comments. The next person will thank you (that next person is often your future self)

4/ Technology is like cricket, an individual sport wrapped in a team game. A lot of working with tech is an individual endeavour, but it's a team game. You need to operate well as an individual contributor and be an excellent collaborator to succeed

5/ It always takes longer than you think (Hofstadter's Law is real), and you often don't control the deadline - try and have a version that's ready to ship even if it's not quite right

6/ Fast web pages with good semantic markup are good pages - 25 years on having a H1 on the page is still a good thing! Web frameworks are amazing, but good markup wins every time

Great deep dive into image optimisation - and a reminder that really delivering on web performance often takes expertise and diligence that's hard to deliver at scale.

I've never really thought about the colour choice, but it's so entrenched now. And a good reminder that linking between documents pre-dates Tim Berners-Lee and his magical world wide web by 23 years.