This was the first service I built using vanilla PHP, MySQL, CSS & JS that ran at a (small) profit. Complete with it’s own backend for management, and forum.
Eventually the service was sold to a small investor.
While the website may not look like that much in 2024, for 18 year old me it marked a milestone and looking back it was actually a great achievement to be able to sell an actual service from something that I had made from scratch.
Today some people would perhaps probably end up building something that relied on a lot more dependencies than it should.. but in 2009 this was just something I enjoyed working on, so I just did it.
& in my opinion, that is an important part of software/dev dev.. Building things that you enjoy working on for the sake of curiosity, and exploring new things. Not because you just wanted to push a bunch of commits into github just so that you can keep a streak to make an activity graph look full.
I feel like there is an art and passion that is being lost with the developers today that are just using other peoples libraries for every single small task, or pushing things for the sake of metrics.
But hey-ho, perhaps that is just my dinosaur opinion. Damn. Never thought I’d be going deep on a random service I made 16 years ago like this. Life is weird.
(screenshot via wayback machine: so some images are missing)