In March 2004, my best friend and I launched a homespun web forum. We spent a few weeks hacking it together in beginner PHP, working after-hours on the computers in our high school library. For many a year, the Library served as a home base for our Dungeons & Dragons group, our Warcraft III clan, and a general, pre-Facebook social platform for our friends and family.
It barely worked. It was a security nightmare. The things we did wrong are too numerous and fundamental to bother listing.
But hey—we made a thing. It was certainly, at the age of 15, my first real, live-fire software development project. We were enormously proud of it—rightly so, I think. And it was a direct precursor to a good deal of the work I’ve done since. So it gives me an ineffable sort of pleasure to have it up here alongside my contemporary portfolio.
Needless to say, we were not so sophisticated as to have the site under actual version control. The last user activity logged in the site’s MySQL database was on April 4, 2010 at 8:54 PM, so that’s when I’ve back-dated the last commit. I once made notes toward a successor: a kind of hybrid social network and wiki, based on a (probably Myst-inspired) architecture of “books” and “writers.” Maybe someday I’ll dust that off and make something useful out of it. Keep an eye out for a dev branch!