I have been a web developer for as long as there has been a web to develop. I ended up working for a large technology company for more than a decade around the turn of the century, until I became disabled and had to leave my career behind. I had already created my own personal website, but it had gone stale after sitting unattended for more than ten years. In the years since, the technology used to build the internet became much more flexible and more powerful than I could have imagined. If I was going to update my hopelessly anachronistic website, I needed to hone my skills to catch up. Time for a redesign.

The Code Room page simply started as an easy place to hold some snippets of code that I had not yet integrated into my main website. Then it became a place to store designs and development for techniques I was learning. Then, it just got out of hand.

Today, there are more than a hundred projects here, with concepts and code that can easily be transferred into real-world web development projects.

I am a proponent of the HTML Energy movement. That's the concept behind artisanal websites hand-crafted with clean, uncluttered code. While most blogs, corporate websites, social media, and ecommerce sites are filled with bells and whistles, I disdain the use of templates, libraries and frameworks unless strictly necessary. Wix, WordPress, Bootstrap, React, and others have their place, but are also great contributors to codebloat. Keeping code efficient, minimizing load times, and providing a great user experience are my top priorities.

Composing code with pure HTML, CSS, and javaScript gives me the freedom to create website designs as simple and elegant as possible, without being locked in to the same user experience as so many cookie-cutter sites.

I have tried to make my code as accessible as possible by including the javascript and styles for each project into the page design so that coders can recreate them easily. Every project starts with a stylesheet common to the design of The Code Room. That stylesheet is listed in the head section of every page, and can be downloaded separately at https://www.duemler.com/
code/assets/codepage.css for easy reference.

Many of these designs started out as projects by other developers from all over the world. Adapting their original designs into my own code has taught me more than a hundred formal classes ever could. I hope this site and all the projects can do the same for someone else.

Now, get coding!