Week in Review: Who Oversees Our Frontend Dev Coverage?
Back in the days when webpages started to become a Thing for businesses of all sizes, a lot of people found themselves in a job called “webmaster.” The job still exists, but in the 1990s it was a jack- or jill-of-all-trades, a title bestowed on whichever employee revealed even a modicum of ability to write code.
That is, more or less, how Richard MacManus, our senior editor in charge of web and frontend development coverage, got into tech.
“I'm kind of like one of those ‘90s web cliches,” Richard told me. Graduating from Victoria University of Wellington, in his native New Zealand, with a degree in English literature in the mid-90s, he taught himself HTML, CSS, JavasScript and Python in a bid to enhance his job prospects. Soon he was acting as webmaster, and then a web manager, for corporate websites.
While working as a web manager, he also became an early tech blogger. He said, “I was doing consulting for startups, about their product strategy, and that kind of thing. And so that allowed me to eventually quit my day job.”
In 2003, he founded ReadWriteWeb, a Web technology blog. About two years later, Richard started hiring other people (including our founder and publisher, Alex Williams, around 2009). “So we had about 20 people working for the company at its peak,” Richard said. “And then at the end of 2011, I sold it to a U.S. company called SAY Media.” He’s been recounting the ReadWriteWeb story in serialized excerpts from a forthcoming memoir in his newsletter, Cybercultural.
Just as the pandemic began in 2020, Richard joined TNS, first overseeing our sponsor-contributed articles and then creating the frontend dev beat (along with coverage of emerging technologies and AI engineering — he’s got a keen eye for spotting trends and their knock-on effects). A couple of years ago, he also made a big move of another kind, pulling up stakes in New Zealand to move his family to South Wales, where his wife is from.
The area he covers for TNS is making moves of its own these days – back to the future, in a sense. The fediverse, for example, harkens back to the Web’s original promise, in Richard’s view.
“One of the most appealing aspects of web technology at the moment is that it's kind of going back to that era that I started in during the early 2000s, where it was much more decentralized," he told me. “Which is refreshing, because for the last 10 years or so, the Internet became overly reliant on centralized platforms.
“But the web is still the ultimate open platform, to my mind, and that's why I love writing and reporting on technologies like the fediverse and emerging standards like web components, because it gets back to the original vision for the web that Tim Berners-Lee had in the 1990s.”
— Heather Joslyn, editor-in-chief, TNS
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