Hello, I’m Neal
I made my first website when I was 18. At the time, the Internet was mostly sites full of animated GIFs, images that would seemingly take days to load, and “designs” that would make your eyes burn. But also around that time the Internet brought the miracle of guitar tablature websites.
Guitar tab sites weren’t exactly legal — like a lot of things online — but they were useful; they made it easy to learn new songs quickly (and for free). I had binders full of guitar tabs: Neil Young, U2, Beck, Oasis, Led Zeppelin, and on and on. As someone that suffered from extreme shyness growing up, music, in many ways, became my go-to form of expression. Increasingly, many nights were spent strumming to Bob Dylan songs and trying to sing — at least as well as Dylan himself. Guitar tab sites helped make this possible.
At the end of my senior year in high school, I had to complete a project. The project parameters were relatively open so I decided, of course, that I would make a guitar tabs site. The site ended up being like many other guitar tabs sites: a front page with dozens of song titles linking to interior pages with the tabs themselves.
After that I didn’t think much about it. That fall I attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I would eventually major in English and History, two subjects far removed from web development and guitar tabs. But when I began doing front-end web development years later, it felt natural. It felt a little like picking up the guitar and strumming along to some guitar tabs. It felt a little bit like expression.
Neal Hohman
June 28th, 2011