I shouldn’t be so surprised that it was really six years ago when I left Boston for parts unknown and wound up in Seattle, but the anniversary snuck up on me just the same. And another anniversary passed by completely unnoticed earlier this year — 10 years of blogging, come and gone. And, now that I think about it, it was 17 (!) years ago in May when I first started working at NIST, where I did some early web programming.
Somewhat amazingly, some of the database programs I wrote are still available! I remember just how excited I was to use a really early version of The GIMP to make this logo:
Even that was “later” in my tenure there. When I first arrived, we struggled to format scientific papers for the web as HTML didn’t (yet) have provisions for super- and subscripts. One of my first tasks was to modify a LaTeX-to-HTML translation program to automatically create images for superscripts, subscripts and equations that would then be included, in-line, with text to make it look like it was originally intended. Not a bad hack, and pretty cool that a government organization was on the leading edge of using technology (publishing physical reference data for free on the web) as well as developing it.