(I posted this on the anniversary news post, but I wanted to make a copy of it here in my own journal, too)

Gonna have a moment of sappiness here, but honestly, DW is the reason I have my own house, and a job that I loved. I had taught myself CSS/HTML as a teenager, in ye olde Geocities days, and was kind of interested in CS, but I got to college, took an intro CS course (taught in Java) and absolutely hated it. So I got a biology degree instead and then tried to find work with that.

Then, in 2011, when the first giant wave of RP migrations happened, my best friend complained about not liking any of the existing styles and I thought, well, I know a little bit about coding, and I used to play with custom layouts on LJ - and the result was Marginless (which looking back on is kind of eh, but my friend liked it! Fun fact: the default color scheme and it's name are for the character she used it for, lol). And then I learned that style patching efforts were seriously backlogged, so I went 'well if someone can give me pointers, I'll give it a go' and it just kind of spiraled from there? And I learned along the way that I actually do like coding, I just hate Java.

And after a few years of not finding good work and just working temp jobs, I went back to school in 2014 and got a CS degree, and got hired a few months after graduating at a fantastic company that does application security testing (and it turns out that coding for DW taught me much better security practices than like... a LOT of companies have. A depressingly large number of companies). And said awesome job means that last year I could finally buy my own house, which has been like, a life goal since I was twelve.

So thank you, Dreamwidth. I always joke that you pay me in food and fake money (points), but really, you have paid me in support and mentorship over the last eight (!!!) years.