I'm a 31 year old American expat living in Oslo, Norway, with my bulldog, Ada, and my husband, Johannes. My interests include interaction design, especially information architecture, philosophy of mind and ethics, cognitive psychology, sociobiology, feminism, yoga, fat acceptance, knitting, pottery, and cooking.Happy Birthday to Opera!
Opera is 15 years old! I first started using the browser back in 1997 or so when I was working at OU doing support and web design for the financial departments there. I had gotten interested in web design in 1994 or so and was completely self-taught, but I had become interested in CSS and standards as soon as I’d learned about them. After I moved here to Norway in 1999 and was looking for a job, I checked out Opera’s website for job opportunities, and lo and behold, they were looking for a webmaster. I applied and had an interview with Jon and Håkon. They seemed to be impressed by my code, which was a major ego boost for me, given who they were and what they represented.
I got the job. I think I was their 26th employee. I was 22, and I felt like my career was really getting off to a good start—this was just the kind of work I wanted to do, and Opera was really the place to be for someone interested in standards. It still is! It was a really fun, informal environment and I enjoyed working there.
Just a few months thereafter, however, my grandmother died, and I fell into a seriously disabling depression. I was on sick leave for a year, and tried to come back to work after that on “active sick leave”, but didn’t manage to make it work out, so I had to quit. That’s still upsetting to me to this day, almost 10 years later, as I see the direction they’re gone in and how it still mirrors my interests in usability and standards. It was such a missed opportunity. I’m trying to get back into the workforce now, but I don’t think I’ll ever have the chance to make a difference as I might have had working for Opera.
After Firefox, and after Chrome, people have been quick to predict Opera’s demise, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Opera’s rock-solid grounding in and commitment to usability and standards—both on desktop environments and other platforms—ensure it a place in the game for a long time to come. Their research in these areas and promotion of these values is still sorely needed. Here’s to another 15 years—I look forward to seeing what they do next.