Hello World: The Making of a Web Developer

The Animator’s Dilemma#

In 2008, I wanted to be an animator.

I had spent months building a modest showreel (amateur work, certainly, but respectable for someone starting out). The question was how to share it. Most aspiring animators carried their portfolios on CDs or USB drives, physically handing them to anyone who might care. But I became fixated on a different idea: I wanted my work on the internet. Accessible to anyone, anywhere, without me having to be in the room.

There was just one problem. I had no money. And I had absolutely no idea how to build a website.

The Setup#

That year, my family bought our first computer—a Zenith PC with an Intel Pentium 4 processor, 256MB of RAM, and what felt like an impossibly spacious 256GB hard drive. It booted up in eight minutes (I timed it), but it was mine. Our internet connection was a 2MBPS BSNL plan with a 2GB data cap. The alternative was dial-up. This was what I had to work with.

And apparently, it was enough.

I reverse-engineered websites I admired, copy-pasted code I barely understood, and followed tutorials that assumed knowledge I didn’t have. HTML, CSS, bits of JavaScript. It was all Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together from Stack Overflow threads and late-night experiments. When the site finally loaded in my browser without breaking, I felt like I’d performed actual magic.

But building it was only half the battle. Hosting was a different beast entirely, one you could only learn through trial, error, and the humbling experience of watching your site disappear because you exceeded some bandwidth limit you didn’t know existed.

I found free hosting. I claimed free domains—first “ganirockz.co.cc,” then the slightly more professional “vfxboy.co.cc” (an improvement, I told myself). The Internet Archive still holds a ghost of that first site: a cobbled-together portfolio with broken image links and the enthusiasm of someone who had no idea what they were doing, but was doing it anyway.

I wasn’t satisfied with “functional.” I wanted every flashy feature I saw elsewhere: animated menus, loading screens, interactive galleries. Within months, I was hacking together custom WordPress themes, diving deeper into PHP and database management, driven by pure stubbornness and the intoxicating feeling of making something exist that hadn’t existed before.

The Pivot#

Here’s what I didn’t anticipate: my website kept getting better, but my animation career didn’t.

The open-source culture that had made my website possible simply didn’t exist in animation. The tools (Autodesk Maya, Adobe After Effects) cost thousands of dollars. Learning resources were locked behind paywalls or institutional access. The barrier to entry wasn’t skill or dedication; it was money I didn’t have.

But somewhere in that process of building and rebuilding my portfolio site, I’d stumbled into something I was actually good at. Something I loved without the gatekeeping. So I pivoted. I stopped trying to break into animation and started learning web development in earnest.

I never looked back.

The Debt#

For the next ten years, I consumed everything the open web offered. Tutorials, documentation, GitHub repositories, blog posts from developers I’d never meet. I built my entire career on knowledge that was freely shared. I became a senior full-stack engineer. I shipped production applications, solved complex architectural problems, and built systems that handled real traffic.

And through all of it, I never contributed back.

Not a GitHub issue. Not a helpful comment on a forum. Not a single blog post sharing what I’d learned. I was a professional beneficiary of open-source culture who had never paid into the system that made my career possible.

That changed in 2018.

The Resolution#

I built my first website to showcase myself. In 2018, I built a new one to share what I knew.

My resolution was simple, almost embarrassingly modest: one hour every day dedicated to giving back. Whether that meant writing a technical blog post, answering questions from newer developers, or contributing to open-source projects. I would become a net producer, not just a consumer.

Life, of course, gets in the way. Projects run late. Deadlines loom. Motivation evaporates. But the commitment remained: sixty minutes each day to close the loop on a decade of learning.

Because everything I knew, I had learned from strangers on the internet who’d taken the time to share. It was time I did the same.

Eight Years Later: Scribblings of a Seeker#

That resolution shaped the last eight years. The blog I started in 2018 evolved through multiple iterations as I refined what I wanted to share and how I wanted to share it. I wrote about technical challenges, architectural decisions, lessons from production systems. I helped junior developers navigate the same confusion I’d felt when staring at my first HTML tags.

But something was missing.

I’ve always been more than just a developer. I’m a photographer. A reader. A perpetual student of subjects that have nothing to do with code. The traditional blog format (linear, chronological, focused on polished “finished” thoughts) didn’t capture how I actually think and create.

I kept returning to Maggie Appleton’s concept of the digital garden: a space where ideas grow over time, where work-in-progress sits comfortably alongside polished essays, where connections between thoughts matter more than publication dates.

So I built Scribblings of a Seeker.

It is, in many ways, the spiritual successor to that first cobbled-together website from 2008. It’s still a place to share what I’m learning, but now it encompasses everything: technical deep-dives alongside photography collections, evergreen notes that evolve over time, a 3D visualization of how ideas connect across domains.

The tools have changed (Astro instead of hand-coded HTML, cloud storage instead of free hosting with bandwidth limits), but the impulse is the same. That twenty-year-old kid reverse-engineering websites in an eight-minute boot cycle wanted to create something and share it with the world. He just didn’t have the language yet for what he was actually building.

A digital garden isn’t a portfolio. It’s not a blog. It’s a living document of curiosity. A space where the act of learning is visible, where you can watch ideas grow from seeds to something more substantial.

If you’ve read this far, I hope you’ll explore the garden. Wander through the notes. Follow the connections. And if something resonates, if you’re also someone who learns in public, who believes that knowledge wants to be shared, consider this an invitation to start your own.

The tools are better now than they were in 2008. The barriers are lower. And the world still needs people who are willing to share what they know, even when they’re still figuring it out.

Happy coding. Happy growing.

This post was originally published in January 2018. It has been updated to reflect the evolution of my digital presence through 2026.