In 2010, I got paid to build a website for the first time. It was a simple portfolio site, built with PHP, MySQL and a lot of CSS. Someone wanted a website, and I could make it. That was the beginning of my freelance work.
I went on to build sites for small businesses and bands in Jersey, on servers I set up myself.
I loved the LAMP stack, with Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. I also couldn't leave it alone. I tried different Linux distributions, swapped Apache for Nginx, and kept rethinking how the websites fitted together. Having a setup that worked didn't stop me wondering whether there was a better one.
Memcached and Redis gave me more ways to experiment with caching. I loved that hunt, moving between architectures to find the fastest, most stable services I could run. The websites were paid work, but figuring out how to put them together was still very much my hobby.
I hated WordPress and the other tools I tried at the time. They felt heavy to run and host, and they often made a simple job more complicated for the person who owned the site.
My clients needed a way to look after their sites once I handed them over, so I wrote my own content management system.
Naturally, my response to software being too complicated was to give myself more software to write.
What I wanted was a simple interface. My clients should be able to manage their sites without learning a much larger system around them. Building the CMS myself let me choose how much of it they had to deal with.
I made tutorial videos for my clients too, showing them how to use the tools. A feature wasn't much help if they couldn't work out how to use it. Explaining the thing was part of delivering it.