or: How, 25 years ago, I went viral and met King (Prince) Charles

Someone has been paying me to work on technology stuff for over 20 years, now. And there’s one weird trick that I’ve learned that I think it’s worth passing on.

This isn’t really a secret code (and the one weird trick bit is a joke, of course), but it was so non-obvious to me in my early career, and it’s so valuable to me in my mid career that I wanted to share it—and also tell the story about going viral before anyone would have ever called it going viral.

The revelation is at the very end of this post, so feel free to skip ahead if you don’t want to hear the stories of how I learned it, but I think they’re fun.

Also, this turned out longer than I expected…

1998

In 1998, I graduated from high school. That last year, especially, I spent a good deal of my time really refining my would-be professional interests. I’d been programming for years, but multimedia was the hot thing, and I had a genuine interest in audio and video.

Our school had a really interesting (and maybe unique) setup where the 3 anglophone high schools in my city all shared the technical programs space, which we school-bussed to and from between classes, as needed.

This meant that instead of each of the high schools having to stock their own specialties labs, we shared resources with the other 2 main schools, at a formerly-4th school. This Science and Technology Centre campus held well-equipped labs for all kinds of chronically-underfunded subjects:

• electronics (I saw my first Tesla coil there)
• home economics (like cooking, well-equipped kitchens)
• automotive tech (a fully equipped garage with a lift where students could learn to work on cars and even fix their own)
• control technologies (electropneumatics, actuators, PLCs, etc.)
• traditional machine shop and CAD/CAM (with actual mini manufacturing/machining spaces)
• wood shop (carpentry, but also a full shop with planers, jointers, lathes, cabinetry facilities, etc.)
• a computer programming lab that was set up with actual compilers, not just typing and Microsoft Office classes
• its own well-equipped theatre for drama, live music, and video presentations
• likely many other spaces that I didn’t participate in or really even notice
• and where I spent most of my time: the media lab

The 4th school has been turned back into a normal high school for years, now, so students there no longer have the same shared resources opportunities that we were so privileged—yet unthankful for the most part since we were kids—to participate in. It was called the MacNaughton Science and Technology Centre, for future web archaeologists searching for references (see my own archaeology woes below).

The media lab was a suite that contained a main classroom that was set up—in addition to regular classroom stuff—for viewing videos and teaching media literacy (we learned about Manufacturing Consent, and talked about 1984), but it also contained a small-but-equipped recording studio (I spent hundreds of hours in there recording friends, learning to mix, mic, bounce tracks, EQ…), and a video production suite that had an expensive-at-the-time near-broadcast quality camera (a Canon XL-1), and a few workstations for editing video, photos, digital painting, CD ROM production (hey, this was big at the time), and all of the related things.

Aside from the unbelievable opportunity that we had with all of this equipment, as high school students, the teacher who ran the lab—the only teacher we called by a first name, by his request—Andrew Campbell was one of those special teachers you look back on and recognize how much time and effort—how much care—they put into us. Weekends and evenings, he was often available to help us get set up, or at least unlock the doors (and secretly share his keys if he couldn’t be there for a Saturday recording session or to kick off a multi-hour video compile). I’m forever grateful for being a part of that program with Andrew back then.

Anyway, because of this experience and the time I was able to spend in the lab, I got pretty good at stringing videos together and producing them into something that was worth watching. There were a few of us from each of the 3 schools that had above-average abilities to run these System 7 SCSI-based Macs with Adobe Premiere.

In Canada, in the 90s—at least where I lived—it seemed like everyone (unless your family was exceptionally religious or you lived on a rural farm or—I guess—just didn’t have cable or access to a friend’s basement that had cable) watched MuchMusic. This was roughly the same as MTV in the ’States. Many of us just kind of ambiently turned it on if we weren’t actually watching something else on the TV—I fell asleep to the overnight VJs, many nights.

One recurring public service campaign, every year on MuchMusic, which was partly funded by the Canadian Government, was “Stop Racism!” which promoted March 21: the international day for the elimination of racial discrimination. If you grew up in Canada in the ’90s, you might remember the hand logo from this campaign.

Each year, as part of this public service, they ran a video competition where they called on students from all over the country to make a short (90 second) video that would enter into a competition where a panel of judges would choose the best high-schooler-produced videos, and these videos would be cut down and aired every few hours on MuchMusic over the course of a month or so. The winners would also be honoured in a ceremony with musical guests and dignitaries.

A few days before the deadline to submit videos for this, a couple of my not-even-very-close friends from school asked me if we could put something together. I said sure. We made up a script (in hindsight, it was probably very cringey, with eggs spray-painted different colours, and the message was that they were all the same inside). We shot and edited the video, and submitted it barely on time (I think we had to postal-mail a VHS tape). We certainly did not expect to win.

As you may have guessed if you’re still reading: we did win. There were several groups of winners, but we were the only winners from our region. They flew us to Vancouver (this was a really big deal to me; I’d only ever been on one plane trip before at this point) to participate in an awards ceremony, hosted by Prince Charles, and several musical guests that we cared much more about, and we got to meet them all at the reception afterwards. I honestly don’t remember what we talked about, but we definitely had an audience with the not-yet-king. (I do remember chatting with Great Big Sea, Matthew Good, and Chantal Kreviazuk, though.)

Our video aired on Much every few hours for the next month or so. We weren’t famous, but if this kind of thing had happened 10 years later, and if it was driven by social networks, I’m pretty sure we’d have called it viral. This was as close to viral you could get (without already being a celebrity, or doing something horribly newsworthy) in 1998.

There’s not much online about these events. I kept poor records back then. (-; I did find someone’s portfolio site about the event, and a video from another group that was entered in 1998 but didn’t win. Here are some newspaper clippings and a print + scan from our school’s Geocities page (thanks to my mom for clipping these way back then). Last thing: I found my official recognition certificate.

I learned a lot from this experience, but I think the biggest lesson was: if you’re any good at all, just try because you might succeed. I didn’t yet know the second part.

2001-2005

The second part of the lesson was revealed to me in 2004 or 2005, but let’s step back a little bit in time.

There are a few main events that put me on the path to learning what I learned. The first was when I took a new job in mid-2001, and I met Kevin Yank (who was living in Montreal at the time, and was just finishing up working at the place that had hired me—we became friends for a while there, too, until he moved away and we lost touch other than an occasional encounter in the Fediverse these days). Kev had just published a book with SitePoint: Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL. I learned a lot of PHP & MySQL from that book (I was working with Coldfusion at the time), and I still have my copy.

What really struck me, though, was that he was close to my age, and wanted something more from his career, so he wrote this book. I thought I wanted that—or at least something like that—for my own career.

A few months later, I signed up to volunteer with the PHP documentation team and I remember it being a really big deal to me when they gave me my sean@php.net email address.

In 2003 (I think), I attended the first Conférence PHP Québec where I met Rasmus and many other people who would become peers in the PHP community. This conference eventually became ConFoo.

In late 2003 I decided I wanted to write for php|architect Magazine. I had a topic I liked and really wanted to see if I could—and still wanted to—build on that idea Kevin had imprinted on me. I did not expect it to be accepted—it seemed so prestigious. But my idea and draft/outline were accepted, and I was told I needed to write 4000 words, which—for a 23 year old non-academic-person—was a LOT of words (even this far-too-long blog post is “only” around 2000 words). But I did it. I was ecstatic to have my piece published in the January 2004 issue.

It was either later that year or in 2005 that I ran into the publisher of the magazine, Marco Tabini on IRC where we’d both been hanging out with PHP people for some time. He’d just lost his Editor-in-Chief, and was venting about having to pick up the editing duties in addition to his regular work. I—oh so naïvely—suggested that “I like editing” and he asked if I wanted to do it. After he reviewed an editing sample exercise he gave me, I started learning how to become the EiC and picked up the role pretty quickly.

So here’s where all of this has been going: when I started editing the magazine, I got to see our content pipeline. We had to run four 4000 word main articles per month, in addition to the columns, and what I saw blew my mind. I’d come into this believing that it was the cream of the crop that wrote for this trade magazine. It was really the best people who got published. That’s what I thought. I was so proud of my own accomplishment of writing for this prestigious magazine. And you know what? Some of the articles were excellent, but more often than not, I had to scrape together barely enough content to make each month’s issue great (and—admittedly—sometimes not great or even all that good). I had to rewrite whole articles. We had to beg past authors to write again. The illusion of prestige was completely revealed to me.

And this… this is the secret I’ve learned: if you’re good at something, you’re probably better than most everyone else who does that something. There’s always going to be the top tier, sure, and you might be in that top tier, or you might not, but the average is shockingly average. It’s really not that hard for you to accomplish many of these things if you set reasonable goals, and it turns out the bar for some of those goals is much lower than I expected early in my career.

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Tl;DR: If you want to do something and think you can do it: just do it. If you’re any good at all, you’re probably better than most people who’ve done it, and far better than those who won’t even try.