Naman

Notes on building things, the internet, stories, and figuring life out.

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Building My First Website Without Understanding Anything

•2 min read•
#building#learning#nostalgia

The first time I made a web page, I had no idea what a compiler was. I didn’t know what “responsiveness” meant, and I certainly didn’t know about design systems. I was twelve, and I had a text editor and a copy of Internet Explorer.

I wanted to make a fan page for a video game. I copied code from other sites, pasted it into my file, refreshed the browser, and watched things change.

Some of it was disastrous:

  1. Marquee tags scrolling text across the screen in bright cyan.
  2. Animated GIF backgrounds that made it impossible to read the actual words.
  3. Midi music files that blasted out of the computer speakers at maximum volume on page load.

But it was alive. It was something I had built, and anyone in the world with an internet connection could see it.

The Cost of Knowing Better

Today, my workflow is different. I write TypeScript, configured with strict compilers, bundled through complex build systems, deployed via continuous integration pipelines. It’s fast, robust, and highly optimized.

But sometimes, I miss the sheer, uncoordinated joy of pasting random CSS styles into a document just to see what happens. When we become professionals, we tend to over-analyze. We worry about load times (which is good), but we also worry about whether our stack is “industry standard” or if we are using the “correct design patterns.”

We build walls of complexity around things that could be incredibly simple.

Finding the Playfulness Again

This blog is an attempt to claw back some of that early, naive magic. It’s built with Astro, yes, but it is stripped down to the absolute bare minimum. No heavy scripts, no trackers, no giant frameworks.

Just some HTML, a bit of CSS, and some markdown files.

/* Minimalist, playful styles */
body {
  font-family: "Georgia", serif;
  line-height: 1.7;
  color: #222;
}

If you’re starting to build something, don’t worry about understanding everything before you begin. Just start putting blocks together. The understanding will come, but the magical, chaotic energy of not knowing what you’re doing is a rare resource. Protect it while you can.