My Decade in Web Development: A Personal Journey and Showcase —

Dive into my decade-long journey in web development, chronicling key projects that have shaped my career.

I published my first website around 2001. Probably before that. Almost 20 years ago. Unfortunately, the exact date I started doing web development is probably lost by now.

Everything began when my dear friend, Christophe Raimbault, a priest in the Diocese of Tours, asked if I was interested in managing and building a website for the "Notre-Dame La Riche" parish. If you are not too familiar with what a parish is, it's mostly a local community of different churches. At the time, this sounded like an amazing challenge but I had no idea what I was getting into. I had never touch a line of code before, I was only 15 years old. I never stopped coding since then.

The following list of websites are the ones that had the most impact on my life. I build a lot more websites but smaller and less important. I'm not including them here.

"Notre-Dame La Riche" parish website (2000-2005)

"Notre-Dame La Riche" parish website was my first website. At the time, no blogs, no Google, no Github... most of my time was dedicated in studying code source of other websites, reading books about HTML, CSS, PHP. It was definitelly a fun time. I was learning a lot, things seemed to be a lot more simple than nowadays.

I still have some code source and I can't bear looking at it just for few seconds 🤣: CSS mixed with HTML, no version control, layouts build with tables... as I said, it was fun but I'm glad things have changed. The website had multiple refactoring along the years. I remember having some animated banners build with Flash.

• Internet Archive URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20050204174756/http://paroissendlr-tours.cef.fr/
• Stack: HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL
• Current URL: https://paroisse-ndlr-scel.jimdo.com/

WikiKto (2005-2006)

Wikipedia was launched in 2001. At this time, wikis were popular and Wikipedia was just beginning. I remember how much criticism this community project received. For many reasons that I have somewhat forgotten, I decided to create a dedicated wiki related to Catholic knowledge. I named it WikiKto (Kto is the French abbreviation for Catholic).

To my great surprise, the project gained a lot of contributors. I was no longer alone. I was not the only one who thought that a wiki about Catholic knowledge was a good idea. I was not the only one who believed that Catholic knowledge should be shared and made accessible to everyone.

The project was officially launched on May 13, 2005. I had to shut it down a little over a year later when I moved to Brazil and could no longer manage it.

• Internet Archive URL (French): https://web.archive.org/web/20060207015812/http://fr.wikikto.org/index.php/Accueil
• Internet Archive URL (English): https://web.archive.org/web/20051227152637/http://en.wikikto.org/index.php/Main_page
• Internet Archive URL (Portuguese - Launched October 12, 2006): https://web.archive.org/web/20070917013037/http://br.wikikto.eu/index.php/P%C3%A1gina_principal
• Stack: MediaWiki, PHP, MySQL
• Old URL: http://wikikto.org/

WikiKtosource (2005-2006)

WikiKtosource was launched few weeks after WikiKto and was the equivalent to Wikimedia. It was a wiki dedicated to offer open source resources for the catholic community. It was a place to share and download resources like images mainly.

• Internet Archive URL (French): https://web.archive.org/web/20060207032908/http://fr.wikiktosource.org/index.php/Accueil
• Old URL: http://wikiktosource.org/

David Dias Blog (2010 to today)

I created a first version of my personal blog in 2010. Few months before I started my first job as a web developer. For many years, creating new content and maintaining a blog has been a challenge for me with so many things and ideas to create. The current version of my blog (2022-2023) is probably the one that finally got the most attention to me.

• Stack: from Wordpress, to Gatsby (2020) and Next.js (2022)

França Brasileira (2009-2011)

Back from Brazil, I decided to create a forum to help Brazilians to move to France and to connect to other Brazilians living in France. Thanks to all my contacts made in Brazil, I was able to get a lot of exposure and the forum and blog got very popular.

• Internet Archive URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20111210020959/http://www.francabrasileira.com/
• Stack: Workpress, PHP, MySQL
• Old URL: http://www.francabrasileira.com/

Frontenddeveloper (2013-2014)

frontenddeveloper.fr was another trial to create a blog about front-end development. I was not very active on it and I decided to close it after few months.

• Internet Archive URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20130205064050/http://frontenddeveloper.fr/
• Stack: Workpress, PHP, MySQL
• Old URL: http://frontenddeveloper.fr/

Front-End Checklist (2017 to today)

The Front-End Checklist is an open-source project I created just few month before leaving Mauritius. Initially build for my frontend team, it became a worlwide and very popular project around the globe. I have been meaning to build a V2, more modern and with a better user experience. Not sure if and when I will have time to do it.

• Stack: HTML, CSS, JavaScript
• Current URL: https://frontendchecklist.io/

World Web Stories (2021 to today)

I officially start the podcast World Web Stories when I was living in Mauritus, in 2016. I was not very active, only had 5 episodes and it was in French. In 2021, unemployed for few weeks, I decided to relaunch the podcast in English with a new format and with the goal to interview one person from each country in the world.

Unfortunately, I choose to spend more time on my other podcast "Erreur 200". I still want to continue this project, but I'm not sure when I will.

• Stack: Gatsby, React
• Current URL: https://worldwebstories.com/

Erreur 200 (2021 to today)

Erreur 200 is a French podcast I co-host with Jean-Rémy Duboc about web development. We talk about our experience, our mistakes, our successes, our tips and tricks. We also interview people from the web development community.

• Stack: Gatsby, React
• Current URL: https://erreur200.com/

Conclusion

Looking back more than 10 years, I'm very proud and grateful for all the opportunities and projects I had the chance to work on. I'm also very grateful for all the people I met along the way. Those projects shaped in a way my career and life and I'm not even mentionning all the professional projects I've worked on.