Let's play

What if?

A big part of my job today is basically doing what 16-year-old me was doing in 1996: Taking web technology and trying to make it do things it probably wasn't designed to do. Things are very different of course. At the time, the web was mostly made to do text documents only. By wanting to do layout, fancy decorations, animations, and more, I was experimenting without really knowing it. Today, we have many more things at our disposal, but it's essentiall the same spirit. This is often how things go for me: I start working with an engineer or a product manager on the Edge team, who's thinking about shipping a new feature for the web. I get to be the tester 0, often testing things before they're even available anywhere. And I start testing this thing, but at some point I wonder: What if we made it do this instead? Or: How far can we take this? And then I build something silly. But occasionally the silly thing exposes something very real.