The first thing I ever grew on the internet was not software. It was a meme page.
I was eight or nine and had just been given a phone. I installed social media, scrolled the pages everyone scrolled, and laughed at the things everyone laughed at. Then a thought arrived that I now recognise as the start of most of what followed: I could make these. If a page of cartoons and jokes could reach that many people, so could mine.
So I made pages, and they grew. I started talking to the people who ran other pages, trading reach, learning who posted what and when. Without meaning to, I was learning how social media actually works from the inside: how accounts are run, why they are run that way, what ends up in front of people, and what people do with what ends up in front of them.
Then I let it go. A page has two futures: you sell it or you keep feeding it, and neither one was going to teach me anything new. I did not have the words for it then, but that was the first time I left something because it had stopped teaching me, rather than because it had stopped working. It would not be the last.
In March 2020 the schools closed and everyone went indoors.
I downloaded Discord because that is what you did, on the vague assumption that I might play something. I did not, really. I never had a console and never wanted one. What I found instead were the conversations, and among the people having them, by pure luck, a few who wrote software. I kept asking them what they were doing until the answers started to make sense, and then I started learning JavaScript and writing Discord bots.
The question that mattered came early, and it was not a technical one. I could make a bot. So what? Why would anyone use it?
The answer was sitting in every busy server. People swore, spammed, and flooded the chat, and the only defence was a moderator doing it all by hand: block, ban, mute, repeat. So I built a bot that did it for them, configurable in Turkish and English, guarding both the text channels and the voice ones. That became Chat Guard, and it spread further than I had any right to expect.
My name was in the bot's description. That turned out to matter more than the code. When something broke, people wrote to me directly, from all over the place, mostly in English. I answered every one, and most of the English I write on this site I learned in those conversations, explaining bugs to strangers.
After a while the messages changed. People stopped reporting problems and started asking for things: could I build them a bot of their own?
Then one day someone asked whether I could build them a website.
I said yes. I did not know how to build a website. I learned in the time between saying yes and having to deliver, which is a terrible way to plan a project and a very good way to learn something. When it was done, I noticed that I had enjoyed it more than the bots, and that was enough of a reason to move.
The first thing I built for myself on the web came out of an irritation. This was before YouTube Premium, and the adverts were relentless. I did not like ad blockers either. But I had noticed that videos embedded on other websites played without adverts, so I put everything I was watching onto a site of my own and watched it there. Then it seemed silly to keep it to myself, so I opened it up for other people to use.
Looking back, that is the pattern under all of it. The meme pages, the bot, the embed site. Each was something I wanted, then something I made, then something other people could enjoy using. I have never been much interested in software nobody uses.
The web led me backwards, away from the part people see and towards the part they do not. Talking to the same people I had met on Discord, I drifted towards the back end, because it seemed to me that was where things actually held together or fell apart. I learned hosting by breaking it, networking by needing it, and databases from MongoDB through to PostgreSQL by choosing the wrong one at least once.
By fourteen I knew enough to be restless. Someone would ask for a website, I would build it, they would be happy, and I would feel nothing in particular. I could keep doing that indefinitely, which was exactly the problem.
So I decided to build a platform of my own, and that is a story I have already told.
I have thought a fair amount about why the early years went the way they did, and the honest answer is less flattering than talent. I said yes to things before I knew how to do them, and then I had no choice but to find out. It is not a method I would recommend to anyone with something to lose. At thirteen, I had nothing to lose, and it was the best teacher I have had.