I work on the web, and have been for many years. Ever since I dialed to the internet with my 14.4k modem in high school, I fell in love with the web.

Back in the days, I coded HTML in notepad using nested tables layout, kept refreshing my netscape browser to check my changes. When Flash was the new cool thing, I started hacking flash’s actionscript when it didn’t have script editor.

And then I got into server side programming. Coldfusion at work, PHP at home. Developing a CMS was a prerequisite for every web design companies. I also did abit of research into the semantic web as my final year project at University.

After getting sick of programming in Flash (it’s so buggy) and building yet another CMS, I got into front end development. CSS, web standards, tableless XHTML, accessibility were all the new buzz words. Consulting in HTML development could be a profession, thanks to IE and the browser war.

Then came the era of web2.0. Ajax was the new must have feature in all web apps. So I started building hard core ajax apps, tested painfully in all browsers and joined an online storage startup (let’s not talk about that). I almost stopped programming entirely and just wanted to stay away from browser compatibility issues. Usability consulting seemed to be a more satisfying job.

One day, I heard about this new MVC framework called Ruby on Rails. I wasn’t too interested at first, as I’ve seen too many not-so-user-friendly MVC attempts. I spent sometime building a little app, I was enlightened. Since then I’ve been fullly indulged with ruby and building web apps again.

Then, Steve Jobs announced a new device – iPhone. That has changed the mobile applications and mobile internet game completely. Occasionally, I dream about what I could do with the iPhone.

Now as an entrepreneur, I’ve started a ruby on rails software development company and we’ve developed our own product Ankoder. Since youtube was proven to be successful, future of videos will be huge. Bandwidth speed will be much faster, cost will be lower, people would like to take their media to many other devices. We’re hoping we can lower the barrier of entry for small companies to ride this next wave.