From my early days on a Commodore 64 to my first HTML pages on Tripod, I have never really stopped building the web in my own way.

The first time, I was about ten years old. My father came home one day with a Commodore 64, a machine that seemed to come straight from the future. I still remember a magazine I bought — one of those filled with lines of code to be patiently copied, spread across pages marked ‘4/6’ or ‘2/5’, as if it were a treasure in several pieces. I didn't understand everything, but I typed each character with the conviction that something magical would happen at the end. And sometimes, indeed, something appeared on the screen. That was enough to fascinate me.

The second time, I was about twenty years old. The internet finally arrived in my home, and with it Tripod, that incredible first tool that allowed you to create web pages with varying degrees of success, but oh so exciting. Everyone was talking about HTML, and it opened up a whole new world for me. I bought books, learned to understand what I was doing, modified, deleted, broke, and started over. This time, the magic had a name, a function, a logic — and I could master it.

That was when I realised that coding wasn't just something I liked doing: it was something I had to do. Even today, every project brings me back a little to those first two sparks: the wonder of a child in front of a Commodore 64, and the excitement of a young adult discovering that the web was an infinite playground.

Stéphane, freelance web developer.