Mark Zuckerberg’s Design Skills, Circa 2001 | Hacker News Reader

Mark Zuckerberg’s Design Skills, Circa 2001

techcrunch.com

12 pointsGVRV12 comments

Doing is how people learn in this field. I'm sure there are some real doosies in the way-back machine by me.

That's for sure. It reminds me when I did my first website on Angelfire (which coincidentally was also at age 16). At the time I thought it was the best thing I've ever made, now I look back and realize how hideous it is. I'm feeling nostalgic. :(

'Hideous' is a rather relative in the context of the geocities/angelfire web era. I don't even think things like 'good web design' really crossed my mind. At least not in the way that you see those "top n ways how to code a modern website" type of articles. The web in general was a giant novelty, so all my friends and I really cared about was how cool something looked on the screen.

Somebody's confusing design ability with coding ability.

Still, that's a really terrible user interface. Engineers at least can create something of the quality of GNU's site or the Linux Kernel site. And the markup on those early Zuckerman pages has mix-matched casing. Looks like a copy paste job.

So what. Copy-paste and modification is a totally cool way to learn and do. That's the reason why web technologies spread so fast: it was easy to see how a web page was done, copy it and do some modifications.

Dude, he was 16.

We live in an age of record. Thanks in no small part to Zuckerberg himself, the next great wave of software engineers and entrepreneurs who we admire, respect, and study will have surely done something stupid on the internet. Or maybe they made an ugly website. People learning make mistakes. They produce shoddy work. But doing work is how you learn.

We should encourage aspiring hackers to launch their careers early, collect feedback, and iterate on themselves... even if that means someone is going to mock them for trying.

Right, I wasn't trying to take anything away from the guy. He's obviously a very successful individual. I know I've created some terrible stuff.

The title of the original is MZ's Coding Skills

"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"

Granted FB's first homepage was ugly, but as other have commented solid engineering != good design skills. We've all been there. ;)

Seriously, how is it possible that anyone finds interesting a page written by Zuckerberg when he was 16? What possible interest could this have to anyone?

People are interested in the past of famous or otherwise notable people. This is a little part of his; a little creation before his big creation. Why is that surprising?

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