It all started in around 2011, January I think. Me and my twin brother had talked about a website that we wanted to create together. The website would be like YouTube, without advanced features of course. But our website was going to deliver full length movies, like Die Hard and Bat Man. We got this idea due to similar sites which just had bad quality and foreign subtitles, we wanted to deliver high definition and multiple languages when it comes to subtitles.
We bought a domain, but I’m not telling which it were. Then I found a website which had a very good-looking design. I learned how to “steal” this design, I did but now I wanted it on our website. This would be the step which now has changed my life, sort of.
I had absolutely no clue on how I would get my streaming website to have this design. So I Googled, and as you all know, Google has the answer for everything. Because I didn't know how to code I would turn to Dreamweaver, now I could use the simple “preview” tab and visually edit heights of different containers, use color pickers when I would like to edit some colors.
Please note that this was just HTML, our website had like 200 different HTML-pages, which I had to manually update.
Sure, time would learn me a things or two. It was just to carry on.
A small conclusion this far would be as easy as some objects in a list below:
Somewhat around a year later
Time had really given us different views on things, we had now cracked softwares which converted unsupported movie formats to .mp4, we even had upgraded to Wordpress, and our Facebook-page had around 200 likes. Now people really wanted to watch movies at our website, and we got donations, allot!
I studied HTML & CSS basics on Nettuts+ channel on YouTube, I think I learned almost all basics in just one day. Now, what I didn't know was that this would have changed my life two years later.
Months went on, maybe three of four. I wanted to create a Wordpress theme for our site so that we got our unique appearance, it was quite harder than I thought from the beginning.
Our site was alive and popular, we had users which uploaded material and administrators so that we didn't need to put down more effort on it. This would let me to make smaller websites and modifications on peoples blogs and such, just for being a good friend.
Now two years had gone, our site was huge and we had around 15 000 users watching our website weekly, we were stunned ad first but then we became overwhelmed with movie suggestions, questions and overly attached fans, which was fun at first but was to become a pain in the ass for us.
Our website was shutdown due to complain from the TV-station ‘Kanal 4' here in Sweden, they didn't like that were streaming their reality-show “Big Brother”. This would lead to angry fans on our side, no more money for candy and beer on the weekends cause people didn’t want to donate anymore of course. Me and my brothers little nerdy hearts were broken, then we just started everything again under a different domain name. Our candy and beer was back and we were relieved, and we felt pretty bad-ass.
We kept on keeping our website but this was just about to work for a month or two, we knew that. And so it did, somewhere in 2013, August, our website dug it’s own grave. But in a way or two, we were a bit happy due to that we didn’t need to maintain the monster anymore.
My brother found another interest, Photoshop and Android programming in Java.
This must be heaven
Me on the other hand, still loved webdesign, I could code-on-the-fly and just create small website, take their screenshots and upload on my Facebook so that my friends could see how “talented” I was. This lead to my first job ever, or maybe not job. But I connected with four other people, all web developers in my age. We used to sit on a rented place of a office-space on a rooftop, have a couple of beers, play the latest indie-music from Spotify and relax and code. This is heaven! It must be, I thought.
We had some small jobs, smaller websites, web-shops and such. This lead to some small money due to the scale of these different projects. I didn't care much at first, but then it hit me. When school started again, I felt that I was spending too much time on our client then I was on my homework. This was bad, sure, I realized it but the worse part is that I didn't do anything about it.
This went on and on, I was really failing at school. The side-effects of not doing my homework and code instead lead to that I did my homework at night, around two or four hours before school.
I don’t think I can explain how tired I was, I skipped lunch sometimes to that I could sleep before the next lessons. Now I don’t want you to feel that programming is like and addiction and that is bad for you, it really isn’t. Programming is the best thing that I’ve done, for an instance, imagine that you have this “common everyday-problem”, now if you could solve that in code, you could actually become a very rich and powerful individual.
Oh well, nowadays I learn different thing all day. Now I’m sitting with an JavaScript library called “Ember.js” and is working on a web-application which I will write about in later posts. So if you’re interested in some interesting integration with smartphones, tablets, and desktops you should remember me. We could learn a thing or two together.
If I would summarize this journey, I would say that giving up or never try is just a bad thing. Some of you maybe have thought that you would be a rock star, celebrity, dishwasher och a award-winning actress. Well, you could be on the correct path but it’s now nerdy to know how to code. That’s just wrong to believe, if you know how to create beautiful documents in Microsoft Word or know how to create a web-application which does amazing stuff.
Don’t be a jerk, explore your capabilities and never say no to code. Coding is a superpower!
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