Where it started
It started in 2021 with a sheet of paper. I was doing my O/Ls at De La Salle College, Colombo, when my IT teacher drew a home page structure with a pen and asked me to build a website for the college.
All I knew then was Blogger. I tried to make it work there for weeks and kept hitting its limits, so I went to YouTube and learned HTML, then CSS. I searched almost the whole internet for college websites to get ideas, and that habit of finding inspiration before I start is one I still have.
I found a basic college template on GitHub and spent about three months reshaping it, often nine hours a day and late into the night, until it had a new home page and more than 12 pages. A contact form pushed me to learn JavaScript. I shipped the first version on GitHub Pages in 2021, and with help from Antonio Rennvick Annoson, an old boy of the college, it went live at delasalle.lk in 2022.
In February 2023 that site won a TopWeb.LK award from LK Domain Registry. I never expected a certificate for the small website I made as a kid, but it happened.
I wrote the whole story in My Journey From Self-Taught Beginner to Web Developer (LinkedIn, April 2024).
