Originally I started out wanting to be a designer. I had to make my designs functional so I popped them into Dreamweaver and out came a website. As the websites got more sophisticated I found myself digging into code view to make things work and look right. Thats where I found my passion and what I saw as the biggest gap in the industry. I started coding reusable CSS classes and JavaScript behaviors (dhtml, anyone?) before the days of jQuery and all that.

What I came to realize is that, although I was the lowest paid person in the shop due to both age and role (HTML/CSS was looked at as a peon job), I felt as though I was doing the most important job I could. I was looked down upon, but knew what I was doing was important and I wanted to learn the most I could despite that fact.

For example, if the HTML wasn't coded right then the search engines wouldn't see the website. How come no one spent time making sure it was right? If the UI didn't feel right or work in all browsers the website would lose customers. And because no other coders knew design principles they all sucked at coding interfaces. I found my niche and I was driving a lot of value into businesses. And designers loved working with me because finally a coder understood how important it was to carry the intent of the design into the execution. It was a magical feeling. Still is today!!

I also want to mention that my managers were impressed with my work and said I could increase my salary by 2x or more being a backend developer. I spent many years learning how to build big systems with Ruby, PHP, Java, .NET, etc. But I never fell in love with it like I did UI dev.

I now focus solely on UI development and am happy doing that. :)