Hello World

The first website I ever built was on a beige Gateway in my family’s living room. I was 14, working from a copy of HTML for Dummies that my mom picked up at a bookstore. I don’t think she knew what she was starting.

I remember the feeling of saving a .html file, opening it in a browser, and seeing something I made appear on the screen. It was magic. Actual magic. I could type words into a text file and they’d show up in a browser that anyone in the world could use. That feeling stuck with me for a long time.

The early web

This was the early 2000s. CSS existed, but nobody trusted it. If you wanted rounded corners, you sliced up images in Photoshop and reassembled them in a table. Layouts were tables. Navigation was tables. Everything was tables.

I had a Geocities page. It had a visitor counter and a guestbook. Eventually I got into Flash, building intro animations that nobody asked for. I thought it was the greatest thing ever made.

And honestly? It kind of was. The web back then was full of people building stuff for no reason other than they wanted to see it exist. There was no framework discourse, no build step, no deployment pipeline. You wrote HTML, maybe some JavaScript if you were feeling ambitious, and you FTP’d it to a server. Done. Live. On the internet.

Turning it into a career

The hobby became a skill, and the skill became a career. I watched the web grow up. CSS went from unreliable to essential. JavaScript went from toy language to the backbone of everything. I learned to build real things, for real users, at real scale.

I got good at it. I got hired for it. I ended up at a big tech company, working on products that millions of people used. That sounds impressive, and parts of it were. But something happened along the way that I didn’t notice at first.

The slow fade

Big companies are good at a lot of things. Shipping fast isn’t one of them.

I spent years in a cycle of planning meetings, refinement meetings, and meetings about meetings. The gap between having an idea and seeing it live stretched from days to quarters. The bureaucracy was heavy. The feedback loops were long. And slowly, without really realizing it, I stopped building things for fun.

I still cared about craft. But the part of me that used to sit in front of a screen at midnight making things for no reason, the kid with the HTML book, that part had gone quiet.

The spark

When GPT-3 first came out, something clicked. I started experimenting with it on nights and weekends, and I felt a feeling I hadn’t felt in years. There were things you could build now that genuinely didn’t exist before. Whole categories of products that weren’t possible six months earlier.

It wasn’t nostalgia. It was the same thing I felt at 14, staring at that Gateway. The sense that something new was here, and I could build with it.

So I started building again. Side projects. Prototypes. Things that didn’t need stakeholder approval or a quarterly roadmap. And it felt great.

This site

I haven’t had a personal site in a long time. I’ve been meaning to put one together for years, the way you’re always meaning to clean out the garage. It kept not happening.

But here it is. Almost twenty-five years after that Geocities page, I’ve got a corner of the internet again.

I don’t have a grand thesis for what this site will become. I’ll write about things I’m thinking about. Design systems, AI, the tools and ideas that hold my attention. Maybe some of it will be useful to someone. Mostly I just want to build things again and have a place to talk about them.

It’s good to be back.