Farewell, Dynamic Drive

Every year, for over half my life, I have received an automated email wishing me a happy birthday from the Dynamic Drive Forums. Every year, it's been a constant little reminder of where I came from and where my whole career kicked off.

The earliest email in my archives mentioning Dynamic Drive is dated July 2008 (which would make me 12 years old at the time), and the last forum thread reply was in late-2010. Three years seems like a short period of my life, but it’s hard to convey just how foundational this time was for me.

The old emails of thread replies and DMs provide a snapshot into my earliest forays into web development: struggling to write SQL queries, asking for help aligning dropdown menus between IE and Firefox, contributing screenshots of my Linux desktop to a “post your setup” thread, and endless questions about PHP…

To this day I’m sure I pull on the foundational skills I gained by reverse-engineering the “DHTML” JS/CSS in the Dynamic Drive scripts, and the feedback and selfless assistance offered by a community of people around the world whom I never knew beyond an anonymous username.

It’s a weird feeling to have been impacted by a site I know nothing about – I have no idea who ran this thing, whether it was a company or one guy, let alone who any of the forum users were… I can only imagine what my parents thought of me talking online with strangers all day. Thankfully, the conversations never really went past PHP or sick Windows Vista theme hacks.

2025 is the first year I never received my birthday wishes from vBulletin. When I went to log in and check on my old account, I was greeted instead with a parking page saying “this domain is for sale…” My heart sank.

Based on the Wayback Machine, it seems like the site went offline at some point in September 2024. A cornerstone of my earliest years in software development, left largely untouched and left online for a decade, finally disappeared.

Farewell, Dynamic Drive.