Everything Old Is New Again

I built my first website as a kid without understanding how any of it worked. Years later, building one again has me asking very different questions.

When I was younger I built a WarriorCats fan website.

I didn’t know anything about hosting or DNS or servers. I just knew that if I clicked around long enough inside Webs I could make things appear. Pages, widgets, backgrounds. Eventually I added a chat box so people could talk on the site and I thought that was the most advanced thing I had ever built.

At the time it felt like owning a website.

Looking back, it was really more like decorating a room inside someone else’s house. The platform owned everything underneath it. I was just moving furniture around.

Eventually that whole phase of the internet disappeared from my life. The site went away, the community moved on, and I stopped thinking about how websites worked at all.

Years later I ended up in cybersecurity.

Most of my day now revolves around systems I didn’t build. Logs, alerts, traffic, authentication events. Instead of creating things, I spend a lot of time trying to understand what already happened and whether something looks wrong.

Then I got an itch…

This site started as a small project. I just wanted a place to put some of the diagrams and notes I’ve been making while studying security. But the moment I started building it, something felt very familiar.

The same curiosity I had years ago came back immediately.

Except this time the questions were different.

Instead of “how do I make this page look the way I want?” the questions were more like:

How does the domain know where to go?
What actually happens when a browser loads a page?
Where does the content live before it becomes a website?

Building a website as a kid felt like magic.

Building one now feels more like pulling apart a machine and realizing how many pieces have to work together for something simple to appear on a screen.

Where younger me was obsessing over finding the right background image for each page, older me is obsessing about how the page gets to the browser in the first place. Still, the one thing that remains the same: my tendency to tackle projects way out of my depth.

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