Tim Lucas
This is me, I also work on the web.
I didn't work on the web through the burst of the web1.0 bubble, and feel I've somewhat faked my way to where I am today... managing to score some big web conference talking gigs, always working in interesting niches of development languages and making good friends with some amazing web minds in Sydney and Australia.
I was never really into programming, but I've always liked to think a lot about what I do and why I do it. I spent good time in high school memorising every HTML4 tag, screwing around with software and creating version after version of toolmantim.com in photoshop and HTML just to try new visualisation and navigation ideas, without really ever having much content to show. This is probably the activity I miss doing on the web most these days, and lament on what it would have been like to focus more on the design side of things.
I guess communicating ideas with people and solving interesting problems is what I most enjoy.
I don't spend a lot of my time building tools/libraries/plugins/etc on the web like many other webbies I look up to, I think because I have this feeling that we have more than enough tools and its just a matter of figuring out how to use them in new and interesting ways. I think this is why I've always chosen to use tools such as Ruby on Rails and Cocoa, as they let me spend more time on the real-world problems. I still try to share my learnings and reusable code.
I'm still haven't figured out the see-saw of "real world" life (income stream, bills, GST, etc) and balancing this with working on interesting projects with interesting people, earning a crust and having a great life away from the screen, with my partner, geek and non-geek friends and my family. I enjoy working for myself, though I've dreams of teaming up with a very small handful of other amazing people to reduce the see-saw and magnify what I can contribute.
I don't really know where I'm going or why I do what I do, but I feel as long as I'm honest, open and having a positive effect on the people around me then I'm happy to continue full-steam ahead.
...and I still get asked for id when buying a beer sometimes, mostly just when I'm in front of a dozen or so web colleagues, but I'm 24... I swear!