I Didn’t Plan to Become a Web Developer

I didn’t learn web development through tutorials. I learned it by downloading other people’s websites and taking them apart.

Real experience comes from experimenting, building&breaking — not by blindly following tutorials.

Unlike the usual path of tutorial hell and building generic projects, my journey started by dismantling websites. “Dismantling Websites”, this term may sound absurd at first, but lemme break it down to you.

There exists a tool called Httrack, which would download static websites for you, and allow you to experiment directly with the source code of the webpage itself. At that time, most of the source code wasn’t minified, so it was easy to understand.

One would be flabbergasted at the complexities, so did I, but hold my advice dearly, if something looks complex to mess up with, start with its fundamental or simpler parts. HTML & CSS are fairly easy-to-understand languages. So easy that people don’t even consider them a programming language.

PAIN!

Downloading the whole website may seem ridiculous — it was. But this let me tweak, not only the source code but also static assets like images and sounds.

FREEDOM!(bald eagle emoji — for obvious reasons)

After spending weeks changing text, replacing images, and tweaking layouts, a thought occurred to me: if I could modify a website, maybe I could build one too.

This is where reality hits hard, folks. It is definitely easier to tweak an existing webpage rather than to make a new one from scratch.

To date, I haven’t built a complete website by hand, because I never felt the need to. There were templates for each website type built by people miles ahead of me. Now there is AI for prototyping.

Obsessing over building from the root is not my type. “Originality” — u would say. What in this world is original? Ponder ………

I have over 10 fully functional websites and over 5 deployed on the web.

Learn fundamentals and go on building.

Never fear building on top of what others have already built,

“The World is built on abstractions.”

Mathematics evolved from arithmetic to calculus. AI evolved from neural networks to transformers to LLMs. Software works the same way. We stand on top of layers built by people before us.

Thanks for reading.

I’m Piyush, a high-school student who spends most of his time building websites, experimenting with AI, and occasionally breaking things that were working five minutes earlier.

I write about what I learn along the way.

GitHub: https://github.com/PiyushRatan Portfolio: https://piyushratan.in/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/piyushratan/