[wuster]

I entered college in Fall 2001 and enrolled in my university's CS program in Spring 2003. While in high school, I witnessed the high flying late 90s dot-com boom from the sidelines, at times wondering if I should drop out of high school or skip college to join in on the good times. Then the dot-com crash and 9/11 happened and the country went into a recession. I had friends telling me I should not major in computer science, and that most jobs are being outsourced away. To be honest, the truth on the ground did not invalidate that opinion at the time. Internships were hard to come by, you either submitted your resume into the dark pits of corporate job portals, or you emailed your resume to small local companies no one has ever heard of. Even in a top tier university at the time (Univ. of Washington), many classmates of mine were happy to get interviews with IT departments of companies whose core business is not computer-driven, e.g. logistics or healthcare companies. Not every CS major lined up a lucrative summer internship then, and some had to graduate with minimal to no work experience, throwing them into the catch-22 of no-experience = no-hire. Must've been frustrating for many. The first sign of life came with the success of "web 2.0" sites like Flickr and Google Maps 1.0, and "modern" developer tools like Ruby on Rails & jQuery. What felt like grunt work just a few years before had turned into more of a joy. Within 2005-2007, I noticed increased enthusiasm from the web community to re-build old ideas with modern user experiences, and the web became exciting again. Then in 2007 the iPhone happened, which led to enthusiasm for mobile-optimized sites, followed by the native iOS craze of late 2008/2009. After that, YC and some of its early companies got recognized in mainstream press, Google succeeded with Android, and open source got real exciting with the emergence of Git & GitHub. From that point on, it was just a dizzying pace of change in web and data technologies.