To start, here's mine...

When I was about 15, I spent a lot of time on web forums.

These were the types of forums where you’d ask your fellow forumites — the ones with ‘m4d photoshop skillz’ — for a new avatar based on some character from some video game, or with some crazy visual madness using the infamous Render Clouds… tool in photoshop, or maybe a cool typographic avatar with your username in it. (I was “Frag_of_lag” back then.)

Well, I was fickle, and I liked to change mine a lot, so I came up with a PHP script which chose from three random images to cycle through whenever that script was hit. So as an avatar, somebody could set that script, with their username as a query string, as the URL, and every time that person was seen on the forum they’d have a different avatar. There was a little control panel and you could upload new pictures whenever you liked, after logging into your account.

This was cool! I had an actual thing, that actual people could use, and they actually did! I think I probably had about 50-100 users, which isn’t a huge amount, but it felt good. I even had a feature which allowed people to add more pictures if they sent me a little bit of money on PayPal. Premium features! What an app! I think only one person ever did this, and it might’ve been my mum.

On refection, this app was ripe for abuse. I didn’t protect against SQL injection and I stored the images in the database. There was every chance that simply by putting someone else’s username in the querystring, and encoding something in the right way, a malicious user with a hilarious sense of humour could replace their enemy’s avatar(s) with lots and lots of penises. Well, nobody ever did this, luckily.

It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t clever, but it was cool to me, and I’d found a problem that apparently some people had, and come up with a solution that they were willing to use. I was proud.