MySpace Made Me a Developer: 17 Years Later, Still Shipping

The Origin Story Nobody Asked For

I was a MySpace kid. Full confession: GIFs everywhere, background images that probably violated several design principles, and an autoplay song that was basically my entire personality compressed into three minutes. Updated weekly. No warnings, no apologies, just pure mid-2000s chaos the moment you landed on my page.

If you were one of those people who actually dug into the code to make your profile look completely different from everyone else's, same. We would've been mates.

That whole era was my first real taste of building something on a screen that other people could actually experience. I didn't have fancy words for it. I just knew I loved making things exist.

The Competition That Changed Everything

In high school, I joined FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America) and competed in a website design competition. Placed second.

Not first. Second.

And honestly? Didn't matter. What stuck with me was seeing something I built just sitting there, being judged on its own merits. I made that. From scratch. It existed because I decided it should exist.

That feeling never left.

The Messy Middle Part

The path from "girl who placed 2nd in a high school web competition" to Senior Software Engineer is not a highlight reel. There was imposter syndrome. Codebases I opened and immediately wanted to close. Things I Googled that I definitely should've already known. Deployments that failed because of the dumbest possible mistakes.

There were genuine moments where I wondered if I actually belonged in this field.

I'm still learning. Still figuring things out. Anyone who tells you that part stops at some point is either lying or not pushing themselves hard enough.

Stumbling doesn't mean you're in the wrong place. It just means you're actually doing the work.

What 17 Years In Actually Looks Like

I spent 16 of those years at The Weather Company building products that tens of millions of people used every single day. That changes how you think about code.

You stop treating it like a checklist and start treating it like something that actually matters. Because it does. When that many people depend on what you build, performance isn't optional. Accessibility isn't a nice-to-have. You're not writing code in a vacuum, you're writing it for real people with real devices and real lives.

And the tech never stops moving. From HTML tables to Flexbox to Grid. From vanilla JS to jQuery to Angular to React. From "just get it working" spaghetti code to TypeScript and component libraries and design systems that have to hold up at scale.

I've had to learn, relearn, and straight up unlearn things more times than I can count.

I genuinely love that about this job. Most days.

Why I'm Still Here

Because I still love it. Even on the days I absolutely don't (if that makes sense).

I get to be logical and creative at the same time. I get to write something clean and structured that also looks good and feels good to use. I get to design things too. Those two sides don't always get to coexist in most careers, and I love that this work lets them.

Over time, I realised that "looks good and feels good to use" has to include everyone. Something isn't really done if only some people can use it. That's why accessibility matters so much to me now.

Every project still teaches me something. Different problems every time, different challenges, something new to figure out.

And that girl who spent way too long perfecting her MySpace layout before she even knew what CSS was? She still shows up every time a component renders exactly like the mockup. Every time the console comes back clean. Every time something she built just works. Every time she gets an "LGTM" on a PR.

The Long Game

Software engineering as a career isn't what people think it is. It's not grinding leetcode until your eyes bleed. It's not 10x rockstar ninja moves. It's showing up, shipping things, learning from what breaks, and doing it again tomorrow.

The burnout rate for junior developers is real. The industry can be exhausting. But here's what I've learned after 17 years: the people who stick around aren't the ones who never struggle. They're the ones who found a reason to keep going that's bigger than the struggle.

For me, it's still that same feeling from the MySpace days. Making something exist that didn't exist before. Watching people actually use it. Knowing it works because I made it work.

Getting second place at a high school competition started all of this.

I'll take it.