What the web looked like from a teenager's bedroom

The first website I built was terrible by every measurable standard. Animated GIFs, nested tables, a color scheme that should not have been allowed to exist, a guest book that received exactly three entries from people I knew.

I remember it as one of the most satisfying things I had ever made.

There is something about the early web that gets lost in retrospect — the sense that you were building in genuine terra incognita. No established templates, no best practices, no competitive landscape to position yourself against. You tried things because you were curious about what would happen.

LightWolf Studios was the name I gave to this period. A teenager's affectation, but also a genuine declaration of intent: I was building things, they belonged to a studio, that studio had a name. The seriousness was earnest even when the work was not.

The skills that period built — HTML intuition, a feel for visual structure, comfort with learning by doing — have never left. They underpin everything I do technically now. The tools changed entirely. The underlying orientation did not.

I find myself thinking about that era when I look at modern web development. The current ecosystem is extraordinary in its capability and occasionally stifling in its complexity. The twenty-step build process, the framework dependencies, the configuration overhead — sometimes I miss the directness of editing an HTML file and refreshing.

This is not nostalgia for worse tools. It is a reminder that the goal is the thing on screen, not the infrastructure behind it. The best technical decisions I make now are the ones that remember that.