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My name is Amit Asaravala. I’m an Internet technologies consultant and contract Web developer located in the San Francisco Bay Area.

A Brief History of My Career

Prior to starting my own consulting and contracting practice, I was the Manager of Editorial & Content Strategy for TechSoup, a nonprofit dedicated to helping other nonprofits obtain and make smart decisions about technology. My staff and I developed an online learning center stocked with hundreds of technical articles and resources for nonprofits, launched a related blog and wiki, streamlined an internal content management system, and managed an active set of forums for nonprofit tech personnel.

For a time, I was a technology journalist. (I hold a degree in Writing in addition to one in Computer Science.) I served as a staff writer for Wired News, and have written for Software Development magazine, Linux Magazine, I.D., and RedHerring.com, among other publications.

During the peak of the dot-com boom, and its immediate aftermath, I was the Editor-in-Chief of Web Techniques magazine. I was also the founding editor of its successor, New Architect magazine. The monthly print magazines had 170,000 and 140,000 readers, respectively, and covered topics like Web design, user experience, security, wireless development, and any other issues important to the “new architects” of the Internet. Unfortunately, with the end of the dot-com boom, too many advertisers pulled out or went bust, and New Architect folded after the Feb 2003 issue.

Recently, I was flipping through old issues of Web Techniques and came across an editorial I wrote in the Spring of 2000 (published in the July 2000 issue) covering what was then a new phenomenon called blogging. Though not the first article in print about blogging, it was among the first. (The article mentions there being roughly “a thousand blogs listed at blogger.com.”) Web Techniques later supported Blogger by donating a server to help keep the service running.

Speaking of Seeing Things Coming

I first learned about the Web in 1994, when a friend in the next dorm room showed me Mosaic, the first popular Web browser, and took me on a tour of some Web sites. I was hooked and started learning how to build my own Web sites, most of them too embarrassing to ever mention again. But I loved it. And at one point, I remember joking, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could build Web sites for a living?” Funny how things turn out.

In retrospect, the Web was a logical extension of my interest in online communities known as bulletin board systems (BBSes). At one point, I even ran my own BBS called the Taj Mahal. The BBS pretty much died after the hard drive crashed the night before I left on an overseas trip — ironically, to visit the Taj Mahal, among other places. (My “co-sysop” and I tried to revive the system after I returned, but the traffic was never the same.)

And Finally, the Beginning

If you don’t count the graphics lessons with the the Logo programming language we were taught in elementary school, I wrote my first program in the 4th or 5th grade, in BASIC, on an Apple IIc. The program would ask for your name and then print some randomly selected greeting with your name in it back to the screen, like “Good morning, Amit!” I never said I was a child genius.