An Ode To The Old Times
Ladies and gentlemen, get ready for a blast from the past. When this website was created, "Hey There Delilah" was a staple of every Serious™️ YouTube video.
Somehow ⎯ I really can't explain this ⎯ my first website from 2010 is still live on the web. I was 10 years old when I created this. To this day, it looks exactly as how I left it.
This is insane. You can visit it here.
The Dream
My journey into the world of making began at an early age. When I was in elementary school, I somehow stumbled upon the site Webs.com, where I began making small mini-sites and forums. At the time, my (ridiculous!) goal was to create a “Facebook killer” called MyAllSocial and I remember getting excited when every new user joined… I got like 10 users in total. All in all, pretty weird times, but it was the humble start of something awesome.
From https://newsletterest.com/message/23805/Solo-Founder-Issue-2-An-interview-with-Sergio-Mattei-of-Makerlog
As a child, my dream was to create a Facebook killer. I'd spend all my days finding ways to make that happen: from learning how to code by myself, to carefully and frequently updating my Webs.com site.
It wasn't exactly successful at that! I remember wildly celebrating every single individual user that would sign up. At the time, I remember it being a huge deal. I managed to convince someone to use something I made!
That last point was particularly important. I struggled to be taken seriously throughout my childhood, both from family and outsiders. I was creating things that were tangible, things that the other kids couldn't do. Hell, I was creating things people 2x my age then couldn't do!
I was building businesses at 12 years old and those around me didn't understand it. Nobody nurtured it, I just pressed on with the naiveté of a child.
I do understand it, to be honest.
The Many Rebrands & Spin-offs
I built many now-defunct sites. Some I probably don't even remember, there's only tiny trails left behind around on random Internet forums about SEO and design.
Some names I've gone with:
- MyAllSocial
- Visiopia Forums
- TechnicaBit Forums
- Alphasquare (whole separate project, actually!)
- Zeam
- Funcrunch
- Hexus
- Mxious
All The Forums
I was raised by the Internet. I'd spend all my time in online forums, particularly:
- SnedekerDesignz ⎯ I used to hang out there... that's where I got introduced to my lifelong passion, front-end engineering.
- Twii.me ⎯ small community by Anthony Rossbach where I spent most of my childhood
- Probably some other sketch SEO and web-dev forums
The Great Free Struggle
A big hurdle I faced constantly was not having money to buy stuff I wanted online. This greatly limited my options when developing sites.
There was zero way in hell I'd get my parents to pull out the Visa to get me a domain name. Oh, and I was 12!
However, I flourished due to the gigantic amount of free site hosts that were available back then. Without free site hosting sites, I can say this with confidence: my SWE career would've never began.
Things that were a serious hustle at the time:
- Not having a domain name... nobody took me seriously!
- Free hosts would shut down, so I'd be moving from host-to-host constantly
- 000webhost suuuuuucked
- If you could find a cPanel and unlimited free host, holy shit, you were golden. Looking at you, SixServe and x10hosting!
- dot.tk domains were absolute ass and spam-ridden
- co.cc, 'nuff said
- Hitting the limits of my free Webs.com plan and not being able to do anything about it
- Setting up Postfix ⎯ yikes!
- Offering myself as a content writer in exchange for a VPS to play with (honestly one of the best things I've ever done)
- Playing around with 128mb RAM free VPS sites (like vps.me)
- Setting up PHP, Apache2 and MySQL on random VPSs that could barely run it
- Using nginx or lighttpd because my free VPS would die with Apache
- Setting up Ajenti because I thought it looked so sick
- Trying out CMS like WordPress and social scripts like Oxwall
- All those times I used "nulled" or "cracked" forum themes for MyBB
- All those times I used "nulled" versions of... everything, lol.
The biggest jump for my career was growing up and getting my first Visa debit card.
