The year was 2005, and I was in my second year of Computer Science. I loved web development and wanted to learn a language that could help me build real applications.

At the time, tabletop RPG players—myself included—had a problem. Games like Vampire: The Masquerade required groups to meet in person, but as we grew older, got jobs, and scattered across cities, gathering became impossible. There were no online tools to play RPGs with friends.

So I decided to build one.

The Birth of a (Very Messy) Solution

I bought a PHP book and dove in. But I quickly realized: Programming isn’t learned by reading alone—you have to build. So I set out to create a platform where game masters could form groups, manage players, and run sessions with a chat and dice-rolling system.

This was 2005:

  • No YouTube tutorials(actually, no Youtube at all)
  • No Stack Overflow
  • Just Orkut forums
  • A dog-eared PHP manual

Somehow, I made it work. The code was spaghetti, the frontend used HTML tables for layout (CSS was a mystery), and deployment meant FTP-ing files via FileZilla. But it worked.

The Rise and Fall of My RPG Empire

I announced the tool on Orkut’s RPG communities. Players went wild:

  • 1,000 users in two weeks
  • 7,000 visitors that month

I was euphoric, dreaming of new features.

Then reality hit:

  • No version control (GitHub didn’t exist)
  • My “deployment strategy”: Take site offline to code updates
  • Sent the fateful email: “We’ll be back with upgrades!”

I was so naive that I thought “I have to take the web app down while I write new features, and then when it’s finished, I’ll put it back up.” - I didn’t know version control, remember?

Between my day job and inexperience, I never wrote those features. Years passed. I kept paying for the domain… until 2015, when I finally let go.

What did I learn from that?

The most important: Programming is about practice. You’re only going to get good at it if you practice. Learn the theory, but practice more. Write code. Read code. Try. Fail. Practice every day.

Do not let yourself down if things don’t work out as you expected. Just build. Eventually, you’ll get it right and learn a ton along the way.

PS.

Two decades later, I’m finally building again. Not for glory, but for the joy of creating—and this time they made it to production.

  • Frame6 - A game quiz about movies. You can play alone or with your friends.
  • Passshare - A web application for sharing passwords in a secure way.