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 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.
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:
I was raised by the Internet. I'd spend all my time in online forums, particularly:
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:
The biggest jump for my career was growing up and getting my first Visa debit card.