My First Coding Experience ( Xanga and the early 2000s )

Most people assume my first coding experience happened when I enrolled in a coding bootcamp at Fullstack Academy. Even my brother — a traditional software engineer who studied computer science in college — probably thinks it started when he handed me his CS homework and told me to try it out.

But that's not quite right.

My real first line of code happened years earlier, in the early 2000s, on a blogging site called Xanga.

For those of you not ancient enough to remember, Xanga was one of the earliest blogging-based social networks I ever encountered. It was free, it was social, and it let you write your feelings for the internet to see — what more could a tween ask for?

At some point, I decided my Xanga page needed to stand out. I'm talking animated stars falling from the top of the page, glittery backgrounds, autoplaying music — the works. Xanga had a Theme section where you could paste in CSS and JavaScript to fully deck out your page. No syntax highlighting. No error messages. Just vibes. (Oh, and no preview either — just a plain text box and the wild, wild web.)

So I did what any curious kid with dial-up internet would do: I turned to Google. I'd copy chunks of code I barely understood, paste them into that box, click “Save,” and then refresh my page to see if anything changed. Sometimes the whole layout broke. Sometimes it didn't. And slowly, through trial and error, I started to figure things out.

I didn't know what a bracket or a curly brace did, but I did learn that missing one would break everything. I didn't understand JavaScript, but I knew how to change the song URL in the code so that my favorite tracks would play when someone visited my page.

Was I coding? Maybe not in the traditional sense. But it was the first time I ever changed a piece of software and saw the results on my own screen — and more importantly, the first time I felt a sense of control over something digital.

I wish I still had that profile. Not because the layout was good (it definitely wasn't), but because that page — full of messy code, glitter, and autoplaying Candy Shop by 50 Cent — was the first time I experienced the magic of making the internet mine.

That was my first real line of code. And honestly? It still counts.