Old Codes, New Chapters: Why Our Beginnings Matter More Than We Think

Most people don’t list “Webmaster” on their résumé anymore. I did. I go into details in my latest LinkedIn newsletter. Read on!

It’s practically a footnote in my biography: I started my career as a web developer or, back in those days, a web designer. Actually, if we want to get delightfully archaic about it, I was a Webmaster. Ew. Saying that now makes me think more about a Dungeons & Dragons ringleader than anything professional. (No shade to D&D. Roll your dice proudly.)

It all began because I was one of the first teenagers homeschooled in my district. This was the 90s when homeschooling was mostly viewed as a myth, a rumor, or a fringe experiment. My school district had barely heard of it. No one was doing it. My mom and I had to drive hours to meet a family who had successfully navigated the process in their district. They connected us with the right resources and helped build a structure where barely any existed.

It was an adventure. A strange, intimidating, necessary one. I turned to homeschooling because the bullying at school became unbearable. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t learn. Leaving was survival. And while I’d love to say the curriculum at home was magical, it was about as exciting as the standard high school one, meaning, not very.

But homeschooling gave me something priceless: time. Time to learn what I actually wanted to learn.

I devoured books. I explored something new called “the Internet.” And thanks to my aunt who was deep into genealogy, I discovered family history research.

She sparked that spark only certain mentors can and gave me a challenge. “If we put this online,” she said, “we could find the missing pieces.”

This was the era when scanning a few pages took hours, and images the size of a postage stamp took up half your hard drive. Yet people on the early web were digitizing whatever they could, one grainy JPEG at a time.

Together we spent entire days in cemeteries, copying headstones by hand. Then entire weekends transcribing them into text files and uploading them to free Geocities webpages. (If you know, you know. Geocities was the place to be.)

My aunt challenged me to take our research deeper, so I did. I connected with amateur historians worldwide (most much older than 15-year-old me) who were delighted that a kid was diving into such a niche hobby.

In 1998 I challenged myself further: I wanted to create a real website. Not a cut-and-paste template. So I taught myself HTML. Line by line. Character by character. I typed everything into plain text files and figured out how to connect them to the Internet.

In 1999, on Halloween night, I launched our first full-fledged family history website. It became a hub where distant relatives found us. Piece by piece, we were putting our extended family together.

By 2001, the website had grown into a massive archive. I decided to turn it into a book, a 500-page, self-published beast filled with stories, photos, and contributions from hundreds of family members across the country. I printed extra copies for historical societies in cities where our ancestors lived. I wanted this to be documented and I hope that it still is out there somewhere!

These years lit something inside me. They taught me I could learn. Traditional school never did. To this day, I joke that HTML is my second language. It’s the only other language I ever truly mastered.

With the money from the book sales, I graduated high school and moved to San Diego, CA dreaming of becoming a fabulous web designer.

And then… things changed.

In 2002, the Internet began to go mainstream. Companies jumped in. Microsoft launched FrontPage. Flash and JavaScript and CSS came roaring in. Suddenly, the hand-coded HTML I loved wasn’t “impressive” anymore. Flashy design took over, and I didn’t know how to keep up. I was young, broke, and without a degree. Overnight, my bright future dimmed.

But that’s the thing about beginnings: they never really disappear. They sit quietly. They wait.

Years later after my other adventures through real estate, operations management, marketing, nonprofits, coaching, I started building websites again. First for friends, then for clients. New platforms emerged that blended my old skillset with new tools I could understand. The spark returned. That younger version of me who stayed up all night writing HTML… he came back.

And now? Web design is another tool in my business and marketing arsenal. It excites me again.

For a long time, I carried bitterness about that era. Big companies took the data people like us collected and hid them behind paywalls. The web industry collapsed under the weight of flashy tech. The job I wanted was gone before I even got a chance.

But being far removed from it now, I see it differently.

Those years gave me space to learn. Space to build. Space to explore what made me come alive. Those nights coding in Notepad. Those weekends typing up cemetery records. Those digital breadcrumbs I left as a kid… They shaped everything I do today. It led me down a path that gave me a solid professional foundation, whether I knew it was happening or not.

We should never discredit our beginnings. Even the projects that “went nowhere.” Even the things that fizzled. Even the dreams that didn’t bloom when we expected them to.

They weren’t detours. They were foundations.

And sometimes, years later, we circle back and realize: Nothing was wasted. Not a minute. Not a chapter. Not a spark.

It all built the basis for something great.

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