In December 2002 I joined a company that was nearly bankrupt.

I was twenty-five. A software engineer with no title beyond that. The company was burning cash, and the next product launch had to happen in January — about a month after I started.

By January 2003, the demo shipped.

It was an HTML browser for mobile phones — with packet reduction built in. It rendered HTML, played back MIDI files linked from <a> tags, ran simple background animations. I wrote it in Java.

The server was PHP. There was no engineer for the server-side compression part, so I did that too — also in Java, called from PHP over localhost.

A strange shape, but the deadline was real.

I remember being a little angry. I also remember being much happier than angry. I had shipped something, in a month.

That's how I started designing things alone. Not as a plan.…