This is part one of the Long Strange Trip — thirteen years of building for the web, told a chapter at a time, honest dates and all. The whole series gathers under its own tag.

Every Dead show opens the same way: the band wanders out, noodles a bit, and somewhere in the tuning a song assembles itself. That’s about how careers start too. Mine assembled in 2013, at a software shop in Fargo, North Dakota — the beginning of seven years I’d spend learning the trade where the winters are serious and the clients are seriouser.

The web of 2013 is worth remembering honestly. Drupal 7 was in its prime, responsive design was still being argued about, and “there’s an app for that” had just stopped being a joke and become every client meeting. Nobody in that room knew that the platforms we were building on would someday be the legacy systems I rescue — which is its own lesson: every modern stack is somebody’s future migration.

What I actually learned that first year had less to do with code than I expected. A software shop in a town like Fargo doesn’t get to specialize its way out of hard problems — the client mix is the whole Red River Valley economy, and the work is whatever real businesses actually need. So the education was shipping: real deadlines, real invoices, real people calling when a thing broke. School teaches you how programs work. The phone ringing teaches you why maintenance matters.

I won’t pretend I remember 2013 in crisp detail — the first year of anything is mostly a blur of not knowing which questions to ask. But I remember the shape of it: the first time code I wrote made money for somebody who wasn’t me, and the particular weight of that. It’s the moment the craft stops being clever and starts being responsible — the first set of a show that, as it turned out, would run a long time.

Thirteen years later I can say what the noodling assembled into. But that’s the rest of the series.

Next: GPS in the bones — the mobile years begin.