I started publishing my memoir here on Litkicks 15 years ago. I wrote one new chapter a week for 53 weeks, covering the years 1993 to 2003 when I was a first-generation website developer participating in an amazing worldwide software revolution from inside the skyscrapers of Manhattan and my home … Read the rest
(This is chapter 46, the final chapter of the first draft of my memoir of the Internet industry, 1993-2003.)
Do we search out the bottom, those of us who eventually find ourselves hitting it? I think we must. But I’d had enough of trouble and poverty by the summer of … Read the rest
(This is chapter 45, the next-to-last chapter of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)
One evening in early January 2003 I showed up at Hendriks Institute’s main campus in Westbury, Long Island to begin teaching a course called Relational Database Programming With Oracle and SQL.
I was supposed to … Read the rest
(This is chapter 44 of 46 of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)
After my job at ArtAndCulture.com collapsed, I began going broke.
The long-term effect of the dot-com stock crash of 2000 and the September 11 attacks in 2001 became fully clear in 2002: the tech job market … Read the rest
(This is chapter 43 of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry. This draft will be completed when chapter 46 is posted in three weeks.)
On one of the first warm springtime days of 2002 in New York City, I suddenly found myself accepting an unexpectedly cool and excellent new … Read the rest
(This is chapter 42 of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)
Heavy emotions hung in the air around New York City in early 2002.
By early 2002 the pile of debris at the World Trade Center site had finally stopped burning and smoking. The “Have You Seen ___?” posters … Read the rest
(This is chapter 41 of 46 in my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)
I spent the days after September 11, 2001 in Queens with the kids, or near the World Trade Center site wishing anybody needed my help. I suddenly had a lot of free time every day, as … Read the rest
(This is chapter 40 of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry. An earlier version of this chapter was published on this site in March 2003 as “A Story Without a Moral, A Day in Dust”.)
Bob Dylan’s new album “Love and Theft” was hitting the streets on September 11, … Read the rest
(This is chapter 39 of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry).
By the spring of 2001 I began to face the fact that I was probably going to lose my job at iVillage.
I’d been working on a Java version of our message boards to replace our old Perl … Read the rest