Lee Kelleher

Last November, I heard about the launch of DOCTYPE magazine, a HTML homage to those 80's coding magazines which you'd type-in-by-hand the printed source-code to play some mini game. That's how I learnt to code in BASIC back then. I felt the nostalgia, sounded fun, I promptly ordered a copy.

A week or so later, it arrived, I flicked through the magazine, there were 10 standalone webpages, lots of HTML, CSS and JavaScript (some minified) code, some spread over pages. I was keen to get started, (but I was also super busy with the Umbraco 17 release). Definitely something to do on a lazy day. The magazine sat on my shelf.

Eventually, one free afternoon mid-January, I dusted off the magazine and got coding, well, copying, but since I've been making webpages since '96, the HTML document boilerplate is total muscle memory. The first game was Meteors, (by Óscar Toledo G.). Initially, I started using VSCode to write the markup, but the modern tooling got in the way. The auto-complete and linting felt like cheating, I quickly switched to my trusty Notepad++. As expected, I made a bunch of typos, probably trying to type too fast, but nothing a mix of browser console errors and manual eye-strain couldn't figure out. I soon had a working game, great fun, impressive result!

I worked my way through all the programs over the next couple of months. I tried to get my kids to have a go, but they were only interested in playing the end result. The Internet Eye Test (by Rico Monkeon) turned into a family competition... I've no idea how my eldest actually got the 1px letter, best I could do was 3px!

I thoroughly enjoyed coding and playing the webpages. Whether you grew up in the 80's learning to code from magazines, or are new to HTML and want to figure out how to make some cool games, get yourself a copy of DOCTYPE magazine, highly recommended. https://vole.wtf/doctype/

Kudos to Matt Round for curating an excellent magazine.