John Gruber

Yes, and finally, I'm here for the thing that will go on my tombstone.

Tell us just the brief story of where Markdown came from.

I went to college in the 90s, have a computer science degree and graduated in 96 and then was doing freelance graphic design work rather than programming.

But with a background in programming and being that age and being a graphic designer, what did I do?

I built websites, right?

It was sort of the perfect confluence of skills and interests.

At least then, new HTML.

Sure.

It was a lot easier to know.

And I had, you know, it gets, it's intertwined with the, what's the origins of Daring Fireball.

But I had this inkling to start Daring Fireball like 98, 99 or something, you know, some kind of blog.

Because I wrote, I was a writer.

Finally, August 2002 is when I started the site.

During the year of 2002, there was this, this is where Neil comes into play.

There was the, well, what do I use?

What's the CMS I'm going to use?

Do I build my own, which I could have done, I still could do, or use one of the things that's out there?

And at the time, like WordPress didn't exist yet.

And I probably wouldn't have used it anyway.

But movable type just came out recently.