I have a slightly different memory of the “early Internet” than a lot of people my age.
My father was a software engineer who eventually moved into computer-company marketing, so computers were always part of my world. We had Prodigy before CompuServe before AOL. I got Photoshop 3.0 when I was in fifth grade in 1995, and around that same time I started making things for the web.
I started with GeoCities then moved into hand-coding HTML myself. I was putting my pages up wherever I could find space: my dad’s ISP hosting, friends’ servers, and whatever little corner of the web I could find – before everything consolidated into today’s platforms.
This was the era of personal homepages and webrings. My URLs were constantly changing. My “home on the web” was often just wherever I had room to put my files.
My workflow was really simple by today's standards. I'd write HTML in Notepad in Windows, open up an FTP client, connect to the server, and upload the files. I knew it was a computer somewhere, but didn't know (or care) what it was doing, as long as my "musings" showed up on my persite.
In seventh grade, I transferred to public school: Dr. An Wang Middle School, a math and science middle school. It was a way to move beyond the small world of my neighborhood Catholic school and into a much larger community of students and ideas. Since I was really interested in computers and computer art, it was a perfect fit. My computer teacher even gave me access to the server in the room behind the computer lab full of candy-colored iMacs, and allowed me to build Wang Middle School's first public website! I was finally in a school where I could explore the things I was interested in, beyond the traditional (and very valuable!) Catholic education I'd received up until then.
After that, I learned lots of different platforms and languages. Dreamweaver, CSS, and eventually WordPress. I could usually make whatever I wanted with enough time searching the Web and forums, using Javascript to make text animated just because I wanted it to scroll across the screen, using Photoshop to create animated GIFs, and reading screeds on why nobody should use tables/frames/iframes/inline CSS until I didn't want to ever read another opinion.
I stopped making my own websites to share my thoughts with people when MySpace, and then Facebook, came out. I was working in cafés in Montréal and volunteering a lot, had more IRL friends than ever before, and had no reason to "keep up with the way the web was changing."
Then, I moved back to the States and enrolled at New England School of Photography for a commercial photography program, majoring in still-life advertising photography and minoring in architectural photography, and I suddenly found myself needing a web presence again. So I learned that people were using something called Indexhibit to lay out portfolio sites. I knew how to install a PHP app from my Wordpress days, and it all made sense. Eventually, maintenance became a headache and I had a little money to spare, so I transitioned to Squarespace and said goodbye to "building." Not because it wasn't fun anymore, but I was out of practice, and offloading those things to focus on the craft of photography was more important to me. If I didn't need to care about the underlying technology, I could be more creative in my photo school projects.
Once I joined the workforce as a professional photographer, though, some things kept happening. I noticed little pain points in my workflows that Adobe, Phase One, Canon, and Apple weren't making easy to overcome. I learned about AppleScript, dusted off the Photoshop action knowledge I'd gained in middle and high school, and started building systems to help make my work easier. Scripts to automate the layer distribution for frequency-separation retouching. Cropping guides for the retouching teams when I worked at Gilt. At Free People, I needed to send the same email daily, so I used Applescript to make an expanded mail-merge situation to turn 5 minutes of clicking into a 30-second task. I created scripts and shortcuts wherever I could, still with that underlying philosophy of making space in my brain for creativity in the photographic process.
I wasn't a developer.
I was just solving problems.
Then, in November 2025, I needed a specific thing I didn't want to pay for, a grocery calculator for while I was in the store. I wanted to go into the store with, say, $100, and know that I wouldn't overspend by the time I got to the cashwrap. I made a prototype using Claude in the browser, and it was amazing! In fifteen minutes, I had exactly what I needed, grabbed the bus to Trader Joe's and put it to work.
Later that month, Google released the first version of Antigravity. I used it to rebuild the grocery calculator, but I couldn't stop! Before I knew what was going on, I'd built a whole kitchen inventory system and recipe suggester because I was living in a sublet in a new city with a weird kitchen situation. Then I rebuilt my photography portfolio site, getting everything off Bluehost and Wordpress and into free deployments with Vercel and Supabase. I even made a Star Trek-themed RPG with an AI dungeonmaster that could be played with friends on a TV using our phones as controllers.
Then came the really fun part: I turned some of my old photo automation ideas into actual apps! I made a Mac app using something called Tauri to make the exact contact sheets I'd always wanted. I made a bridge between a shot-list database and Capture One to replace a program I missed from my previous full-time job. I even made a Chrome extension to turn a guitar tabs website littered with ads and navigation bars into a full-screen lead sheet so I could play without distractions!
A few months later, OpenAI released the desktop version of Codex. I polished those apps and made a few more little experiments, but then something unexpected happened: all the outreach I'd done to try to get work in my new city paid off. I got a call to go work for a new client in another state, where they covered hotels and reimbursed travel expenses. Then I got a second client, closer to home. I knew I didn't want to manage all of this with spreadsheets and build my own invoices by hand, so I used Codex to make a system like I'd used in previous freelance periods - but without the subscription costs, upgrade notices, and other things that distracted me from getting the work done.
And in true Jerome fashion, I also made a webcam-based "theremin" MIDI instrument just for fun.
Throughout all of this, I knew what I wanted and how I wanted it to look, but not how to do it. Antigravity and Codex handled that part for me. I learned about Vercel. GitHub. Supabase. Turso. Clerk. Typescript, React, SQL, Postgres. Or, I should say - I learned they existed. I had never heard of most of them a year ago, but with the help of AI agents I was now able to use them to make my ideas come to life.
I got more photo work, and had less time to sit at the computer playing my new favorite video game: Making Software With AI. I had more time to think than time at the keyboard, and started to wonder where and how things changed. How did the Internet change while I wasn't really paying close attention? What used to take me a week of trial and error just to make a blog layout look ok, I could now deploy in an hour. My web host, ISP, and database host are all separate things now.
What actually changed between 1995, 2005, and now? What stayed the same? And maybe the bigger question: if I keep doing this, what am I becoming?
Is this a new career direction? Am I becoming a software developer? Or is this something else — a way for a photographer and creative person to build better tools, run a better business, and explore ideas that I was locked out of because I chose photography instead of software engineering when I was a young adult?
I’m starting this log to document figuring that out.
I'll share what I learn, tell you about connections I make, and figure out - out loud - what the next chapter of my career might look like.
My hope is that writing about this publicly will help me understand things more, and decide what I want to do "when I grow up."
I started my relationship with the Internet outside of the biggest platforms of the day, and now I think I'm exploring the same things in a new frontier, using much different tools.
If you'd like to follow along as I learn exactly what changed over the last 20 years, what I've missed by skipping straight to AI-assisted development after a decade away from touching backends, and where I want to go next, I hope you'll keep reading.
Until next time,
Jerome