I grew up
online.

Hello, World.

It started with HTML 4. A text editor, a browser, and that magical feeling of seeing words appear on screen that you yourself wrote. The whole web felt like a playground with no fences.

Lycos was my search engine. Geocities was where I built my first site — animated GIFs, tiled backgrounds, the works. ICQ was how I talked to the world, and Yahoo Chat rooms were entire universes.

The first time I made a webpage appear in a browser, I felt like a wizard. I still feel that way sometimes.

Forums & Communities

The web evolved from static pages into living communities. phpBB and vBulletin forums were where real conversations happened — before social media swallowed everything whole.

I built forums, managed communities, customized themes. WordPress was becoming the engine of the web. I was learning that the web wasn't just a place to read — it was a place to build.

Becoming a Builder

Laravel changed how I thought about web applications — clean, expressive, elegant. I built real products. Real things that real people used.

Then Angular appeared and JavaScript stopped being a toy. Single-page applications, REST APIs — the whole modern web stack clicked together. The web was growing up, and so was I.

There's something magical about building something from nothing and watching people actually use it.

React & Modern Web

React was everywhere — and for good reason. Component thinking, declarative UI. Then Odoo for enterprise — powerful, comprehensive, complex.

I learned a lot. But I also felt a tension: the web had become very complex, very heavy. Something was calling me toward something different. Simpler. More mine. More free.