Pete Ottery
This is me, I too work on the interweb.
I work in Sydney at News Digital Media as the Group Interface Designer. 33% of my time is spent doing photoshoppy designy stuff, a further 33% is spent doing css/html stuff, another 33% of my time is spent translating management type speak directly into the previous 66%, and 1% of my time I sit on facebook and try and work out how it works.
I first saw the internet (the version with pictures.. maybe 95?) in a photography tute at Uni when I did a alta vista search for david hockney. In the late 90's I made shocking websites for friends bands using Freeway on my mac (LC-630). I didn't know you could view source after you exported the design.
In the last 8 years I've worked mainly at the 2 big commercial news/media companies in Australia. Initially Fairfax Digital, and now News Digital Media.
I think it would have been very easy for these 2 big companies to wait back in the safety zone with their web development practices, leaving small operators to act first & work out if the "web standards" thing would work out. Instead we have, at times, moved first. And then driven change back the other way. And that is 100% due to small groups of people at the coal face knowing that it is simply "the right thing to do". Not because they were told to. I find this really cool. It could have so easily been a lot f#cking worse.
I'm rarely 100% satisfied with any work I do. I am, almost daily, smashed with jealousy at the incredibly beautiful work that the rest of the design/web standards community pulls out. By lunchtime the jealousy turns into enthusiasm though and I end up getting some work done.
At times I wonder what I'll be doing when I'm 50. Its pretty hard to imagine a 50 year old digging in to Photoshop CS-X-99 & setting up some sprites.
*Re-uploaded. the first time i uploaded it didn't appear for some people. I think something fruity is happening with flickr. Thats my technical opinion.