I made my first website when I was in middle school. My family had just gotten AOL, and I was thrilled. The internet was huge that year. Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks were hanging out and chatting on AOL Instant Messenger, along with all my friends. AIM was the killer app, but I was more taken with another feature: each AOL user was allotted 2 megabytes of hosted webspace. The “Personal Publisher” software they provided to build your site was total garbage—I remember that by default, any <img> inside of an anchor tag had a thick border that looked clunky. But you could also edit your page’s source code directly. Suddenly I had the same power to build pages that any professional “web designer” did. The bar was not high then, and I was full of eighth-grade hubris.