I picked up web design as a hobby in 1998 when I worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Part of my project was working with the LLNL team to study of the effects of high temperature and intense compression (as a result of long term pressures or immediate pressures via earthquakes) on the tuff from the nuclear waste repository site located in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. With that project I needed to learn coding and the Solaris OS which was what most of the fracture modeling and computational data was run on.
Because a lot of our study was waiting… waiting for pressure systems to build over time and waiting for computer modeling to finalize, I spent a lot of time learning other systems in the LLNL lab including understanding what all this World Wide Web and AOL Chat room excitement was about. I picked up HTML and my first site was actually a very simple web page based on astronomy and began with “This is the intro site for Austin “Vegas” and his interests”.
I parlayed that knowledge into my education and built my first professional web page for Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Doing a web search today, I found that it’s still up and being used by the engineers there (unfortunately it needs update, as my Professor is no longer with Cal Poly) :
Advanced Air Pollution Control Controlling Particulate Emissions with Electrostatic Precipitators
Although the Yucca Mountain project was canceled a few years ago, excellent research was developed on how rock materials fracture and of course I started on a path of web design as perpetual side projects…