After my first experiments with Blogspot, I was hooked. Publishing words couldn’t satiate me. I wanted to build, I wanted to understand how websites worked, how those intricate layouts came alive.
The thrill of making something real, not tweaking but making sparked something in me. I wanted to create websites like the cool people in those movies I watched (I’m looking at you, Social Network and The Fifth Estate).
But starting from a blank HTML file felt intimidating. I needed a starting point, some structure. Somewhere along the search for “boilerplate templates,” I stumbled upon two frameworks that changed everything: Bootstrap and Foundation.
I don’t recall which YouTube video led me there, but I remember the sense of relief i had by looking at them where it pacified m e by providing a starting template.
Discovering Bootstrap.
Fiddling with Bootstrap required me learn from documentation.
Until then, I had relied on videos and tutorials to show me what to do. But I couldn’t find one that suits me and I went with Bootstrap’s documentation and it felt like everything I needed was written there, waiting for me to figure it out.
At first, it was overwhelming. I thought I had to memorize every class name, every layouts. But over time, I realized I didn’t need to remember, but to know where to look and that changed everything for me.
Soon, I was swiping between my Mac’s workspaces, one for my code, another for the docs, another for a browser to see the update and to check how to center a div horizontally (thanks to DevTips for that lesson).
Slowly, through repetition, the patterns stuck. The classes became part of my vocabulary, started using plugins like emmet for short hand writings and learning stopped feeling like memorizing, It felt natural.
Learning to Learn
That’s when something clicked: I didn’t need some video or a tutorial to teach me, I could teach myself.
Documentation became my mentor. The idea that I could learn anything through time and practice was a revolution for me (I know, what a surprise).
Not long before, I had been blindly copying code and tweaking them. Now, I was decoding patterns, solving problems, and creating something new.
That mindset stuck with me, even now. If I don’t know something and I need it, I learn it. It’s that simple.
Exploring the Layers
As I practiced more, the giant CSS files, repetitive HTML blocks, patterns started bothering me and made getting back to those code hard. I didn’t know what I was searching for, but I wanted to optimize.
Then came another turning point: Devtips , His videos opened the door to a new vocabulary: Sass , SCSS , Jade and eventually to Jekyll .
Each discovery felt like stepping into a deeper layer of the web, peeling back abstraction after abstraction, learning how things fit together.
Every framework I found wasn’t just another tool, it was another way to see, To build faster, think sharper, and trust that curiosity will always find a path.
In the Next Part…
Next, we’ll talk about Jekyll and how it introduced me to static sites, themes, and the joy of building something that felt almost alive.