At Farmington High, my friend Jacob and I looked after the school's computers and network for credit instead of taking a regular class. By seventeen I was working with him at Cyber Port Station, an internet service provider in Farmington, and around 1999 we started a web design firm together. I remember the name as Matrix X Solutions, which tells you roughly what year it was.
Most of our clients were local restaurants and travel and hospitality businesses. I mostly did the HTML, graphics and animation while Jacob leaned toward the backend, though we traded jobs when it made sense. There weren't many layers between an idea and the page. You made the image, wrote the markup, worked out the interaction and put it online.
I still like working that way. When I make the graphics and write the code, a visual decision and the way the page actually behaves get settled at the same time.