> I've consciously tried to rewind, to go back to when programming was a tool for implementing my visions, not its own end. I recently rebuilt a website I buil

> I've consciously tried to rewind, to go back to when programming was a tool for implementing my visions, not its own end. I recently rebuilt a website I built in high school circa 2001 in a modern framework to make it more maintainable. It was PHP 3 / MySQL 4 when I built it. It only ran as it was with a number of polyfills for long gone language features. The original site was wacky, completely different layouts for different pages, some with characters that tracked your mouse. A ton of creativity. I redesigned in 2008 into a reasonably standard blog format. Looking back during this latest rebuild I feel like so much was lost in that redesign. The point of having a website when I was in high school was not to write code, it was a place to pour my ideas. Somehow somewhere in the last 20 years the means to an end became the end, and I am not sure how I feel about it. I’m certainly not the well of creativity I once was, but at the same time the things I do produce are of much higher quality. Is that just the innate balance of life? I really can’t say. Getting older is strange.