I wrote my first line of HTML sometime around 1997. I don't remember the exact date, but I remember the feeling — the absolute electricity of typing something into a text editor, saving it, opening it in a browser, and watching it appear on screen. A heading. A paragraph. A blue underlined link that went somewhere. I built that. It existed because I typed it.
That feeling has not gone away. Not even a little.
I'm writing this from the same desk where I hand-coded this website. Not with a page builder. Not with a template. Not with an AI tool that spits out a perfectly acceptable generic page in nine seconds. I opened a blank file, typed <!DOCTYPE html>, and built the whole thing from nothing. In 2026. Like some kind of digital Amish person who refuses to acknowledge that machinery exists.
And I'm not sorry about it.
Everyone's a "Creator" Now.
I need to be careful here because I'm about to sound like an old man yelling at clouds, and I want to be clear: that's exactly what this is. I'm yelling at clouds. The clouds deserve it.
The tools that exist today are incredible. Squarespace is beautiful. Webflow is powerful. The AI site builders can produce something that looks professional in minutes. I'm not against any of that. What I'm against is the idea that building a website no longer requires you to understand what a website actually is.
There's a generation of web designers who have never opened a code editor. Who wouldn't know what to do if you handed them a blank HTML file and said "make something." Who can drag and drop their way to a portfolio site but can't explain what a div is or why their page loads like it's swimming through wet concrete. And look — maybe that's fine. Maybe the tools have gotten so good that knowing the fundamentals doesn't matter anymore.
I don't buy it.
Knowing how something works matters. Not because you need to hand-code everything — you don't — but because understanding the thing underneath the abstraction makes you better at using the abstraction. A chef who understands heat is a better cook than one who just follows recipes. A musician who understands theory plays differently than one who only reads tabs. And a person who understands HTML, CSS, and how a browser actually renders a page will build better websites than someone who drags blocks around in a visual editor. Period.
The Internet I Fell in Love With.
I'm going to date myself here and I don't care. The internet I grew up on was ugly. It was GeoCities and Angelfire and personal pages with hit counters and guestbooks and animated GIF backgrounds that would give you a seizure. The fonts were terrible. The color combinations were crimes against design. Everything was under construction — people literally put little "under construction" GIFs on their pages like they were building a highway overpass.
It was the best thing I'd ever seen.
Because here's what that ugly, chaotic internet had that today's internet doesn't: it was personal. Every page was someone's weird little corner of the world. Someone sat down and decided what went there — what colors they liked, what music to autoplay (yes, autoplay — we did that), what links mattered to them. There was no algorithm deciding what you saw. You just found things. You clicked around. You stumbled into someone's page about model trains or conspiracy theories or their cat, and it felt like walking into a stranger's living room uninvited.
Now everything looks the same. Every Squarespace site uses the same four layouts. Every startup has the same hero section with the same stock photography and the same "We're reimagining [blank]" headline. The internet went from the most interesting place in the world to a strip mall where every store has the same font.
The internet used to be a place where people made things. Now it's a place where people consume things that were designed to be consumed.
Why I Still Do It.
I hand-code my sites because the process matters to me. Not just the result — the process. The act of writing markup, thinking about structure, deciding where every element goes and why. It's the difference between cooking a meal from scratch and microwaving something with a fancy label. The food might look similar on the plate, but one of them involved you actually making something.
When I look at this site, I know what every line does. If something breaks, I fix it. If I want to change something at 2 AM, I change it at 2 AM. I'm not locked into someone's template system or subscription model or whatever update they pushed that rearranged my layout while I was sleeping. I own it completely. It's mine in a way that a hosted platform site will never be yours.
And there's something else — something I don't talk about much: I like making things. Not managing things. Not delegating things. Not overseeing things from a comfortable distance. Making them. The world has gotten very good at telling business owners to stop doing the actual work — delegate everything, scale yourself out of the process, become a manager of managers. I think that's garbage. The work is the whole point. The work is where the satisfaction lives. The moment you stop making things with your own hands is the moment you become a spectator in your own life.
years I've been writing HTML by hand. No framework, no page builder, no AI tool has ever replaced the feeling of building something from a blank file.
I Know the Rules. I Break Half of Them.
I should mention — I do this professionally. Not the blogging part, but the web part. I've done SEO and web development for years. I know what Google wants. I understand Core Web Vitals, structured data, semantic markup — all the things that make a website "perform" in the way the industry measures performance.
And my sites check every box. They're fast. The schema is clean. The metadata is tight. I'm not building sloppy nostalgia projects held together with inline styles and prayers — I'm building modern, well-structured sites that happen to be written by hand instead of generated by a machine.
But I also put things on my sites that aren't optimized for anything. This blog doesn't have a content strategy. There's no editorial calendar behind it. I'm not targeting keywords or building "topical authority" or whatever the SEO community is calling it this quarter. I write about what's on my mind, on a site I built myself, and I publish it when it's done.
That might be the most radical thing you can do on the internet in 2026.
The moment you stop making things with your own hands is the moment you become a spectator in your own life.
This Is Not a Manifesto.
I'm not telling anyone to go learn HTML. I'm not launching a course. I'm not starting a movement about "getting back to basics" or whatever would trend on LinkedIn for six hours before everyone forgot about it. This is just a guy in Los Angeles who runs a telecom company and writes markup at midnight because it's the one thing that hasn't stopped being fun in twenty-nine years.
The world doesn't need more hand-coded websites. It probably doesn't need this one. But I needed to build it. And every time I push an update late at night and refresh the browser and see something I made — something that exists because I sat down and typed it into existence — I get that same jolt I felt in 1997.
If you've ever built something just because you wanted to see it exist, you know exactly what I mean.
If you haven't — honestly, I feel a little bad for you.