Certificate: TekMetrics HTML/Web Programmer

I'm a self-taught website developer and programmer.  In fact, my first website (built in 1994) was entirely hand-coded using Notepad on an old 386 computer!  Anyways, while I was living in Denver, Colorado, very shortly before I moved to Calhan, Colorado, I applied for a job as a website developer and the company asked me if I had a degree in website programming.  Which, needless to say, I found hysterically funny because far as I know, no university offered degrees in website development at the time - and HTML programming classes were still fairly rare!

Well, being the early adopter of the internet lifestyle that I was, I looked online to see if there was some lame online class I could find somewhere or another to knock out real fast and get some sort of sheepskin-like document that I could show to prospective employers.  Instead, I found a company called TekMetrics which offered online certification in a variety of internet-related topics - completely for free.  You had to take an online quiz (that was surprisingly in-depth and complex, actually!) but there was nothing stopping you from searching in another browser for the answer.  If you passed the quiz, you were awarded a certificate, which they would mail to you for free.  I still don't know how they were making money - or if they even planned to make money as so many internet companies back then simply profited by IPOs - but regardless, I received the certificates for the tests I took in the mail barely a week later.  My then-prospective employers were suitably impressed by them, but I didn't get the job regardless.

TekMetrics, alas, like so many other internet companies, is now long gone.

They really were sharp-looking, professional certificates...

Above written 27th December 2011