Advice to my Teenage Self
While wandering the halls of Wordpress late last night I stumbled upon Bloganuary – a series of writing prompts that will be published throughout the month. I've decided to take part. I'm a day late, so playing catch-up already. Enjoy!
This letter has travelled 30 years into the past to find your hands. At the time you read this you are single, you still live with your parents, you have just left college, and you are working for the family business.
You better sit down.
At the moment you're pretty consigned to always being everybody's best friend – to never meeting anybody. You couldn't be more wrong.
In 30 years time you are married.
You met a girl in Oxford one Sunday afternoon in 2000. Neither of you thought it would go anywhere at first, but you saw each other again, and again, and nature took its course.
Months from now, your entire family will scatter across England. You will find your career a couple of miles from the girl you're going to meet near London, and will work as a software and web developer. Code you are going to write will be used by big companies all over the world. Thousands of people will rely on the things you build to do their job every day. You will be regarded as a pretty good software developer by your peers, and a great web developer.
You're going to love the web.
The next one is huge. You're going to have three children. Three little girls. They will be fantastic, and will make you smile, laugh, and occasionally shout. The eldest will be just like you, the middle one will have the loudest voice in the known universe, and the youngest is going to be all sorts of trouble (and will have no idea).
You will write a journal.
Compuserve – that you're thinking about joining at the moment – will not last for long. The “internet” will replace the various BBS and subscription services that you've just started using. The internet will be generally available to everybody, and will become everybody's primary means of communicating. It will not be owned by anybody.
Your mobile phone will do everything your current computer does, and much more. You will use it as a camera, to listen to music, to watch movies, to play games, to send and receive emails, and to chat with people all over the world.
You will make friends across the globe. You will become closer to some of the friends you make through the internet than those in the real world, and will catch up with each other almost every day.
Your life is going to change enormously.
You are going to be happy, have a wonderful family, and many friends. Its all good. Look forward to it.