An Ode To The Old Times
Oct 1, 2022

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.

My first ever website
My first ever website

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.

Assets I've Dug Up

A banner I made on a free site
A banner I made on a free site
The ol' FaceYourManga I used at the time
The ol' FaceYourManga I used at the time