Teaching HTML Made Me Miss the 90s
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. - Einstein
I didn’t fully appreciate the value of understanding through teaching until I volunteered to teach young students how to code a simple web application. What surprised me more was how much the kids taught me.
I thought I had a solid grasp of what I was doing. "This will be easy!" I thought. "It's just basic HTML and CSS!" But the last time I spent a lot of time analyzing the intricacies of where a pixel fell on the screen was during the "Web Mistress" era of the late 90s, a period of time near to my heart when teenaged girls dove into the realm of CSS to create dedicated fan sites for their favorite anime series, movie, or TV show.
This era of fandom and geekery was before social media like Instagram or Tumblr, and certainly before TikTok. Coding a website to show your love for Sailor Moon was a badge of honor that was not as easy as simply uploading a picture to an account. It was quite the flex to host and maintain a website, and I think it's a lost art that we should bring back (at least I'm going to).
I was surprised at how much I was relying on scraping up ancient knowledge from this far gone era of Geocities and Angelfire, spinning gifs and guestbooks, and not on any skills that were relevant to my actual, everyday job. All of my Typescript, SQL and Python experience was nearly useless. PowerBI? Don't even know 'er!
After a short pre-made Powerpoint going through the basics of wireframes, and brainstorming ideas on how to make a theoretical app marketable, the kids were more interested in using CSS to overlay simple geometric shapes and compose an image of a cat. I wasn't much help at first in assisting them venture on their creative pursuits (hey, that’s what Copilot is for). I mean, don’t they know that adding an image file is way more efficient? Then it started coming back to me:
"Is it uhh <a href =...> for a link, and uhmm image is ... <img src =...>"
But there was a purity there that was charming - the idea of doing something just because it’s fun or because it looks cool, or even just for the challenge of it. Not because it’s marketable, performant or because it will make you promotion-ready.
So I leaned into their creativity and showed them coolors.co to play with palettes, what hexadecimal values are, and how to set them in their .css files. I suggested fun image ideas and demonstrated how to hunt down the perfect PNG file, and how to verify that the backgrounds are actually transparent (surprisingly, this is still a problem 20 years later). I showed them how to set the opacity on an image, and how to align it with their text. I got into the groove of it and vicariously felt the satisfaction similar to staying up until 3AM getting your divs just right.
That experience made me remember what the best parts of tech are. We get lost in profitability, agile methodology, sprints, ROIs, KPIs and a soup of other business-y terms and acronyms, and forget what brought a lot of us here to begin with - creativity, spontaneity, and messiness. And real. Like chocolate ice cream smeared on your face.
Questions for Reflection
- When was the last time you created something just because it was fun or beautiful, and not because it was practical or productive?
- Are there skills or interests from your past that you’ve forgotten, but could reconnect with in a new context?
- What might you learn about your own knowledge by teaching it to someone younger or less experienced?
Music for Inspiration
Listening to music while working? Check out "Motion" by Tycho—a perfect blend of creativity and rhythm.