The page
EarthI started with a text editor and a server I could reach by FTP. HTML, CSS, a database, PHP. No framework decided anything for me, and when a page was slow there was exactly one place to look. That is not nostalgia — it is the last time the whole system fitted in one head, and it is the reason I still read a stack top to bottom before I touch it.
By 2013 I was running the tarpaulin department around an industrial plotter, and the web was the side that paid worse and taught more. In 2015 the company started in an attic: no office, no funding, no round. In 2018 eFruit put a real shop online, producer to consumer, with real orders and real refunds — which is where you learn that software is judged on the day it is wrong.
45 WordPress installs in production today, on one server, across ten PHP versions from 7.1 to 8.5.
One person could hold the whole stack in their head
Taking it also gives you GRIP in the hero.