I Started Building Websites Again at 46

This summer, I built a website called HandyPebble.

Looking at it now, it might seem like the project started with a clear plan: different tools, different sections, a growing structure, and an idea of what the site is supposed to become.

It did not.

Like many things in life, it started with a much smaller thought.

This summer felt unusually long. I spent a lot of time at home, and I kept feeling that I should be doing something. Not because I had a grand startup idea. Not because I had already figured out a business model. I simply did not want to watch the days pass without building anything.

So I started making websites again.

After college, I worked as a visual designer at an internet company. Web design, graphics, interfaces, and digital products were once part of my daily work. Later, life took me in a completely different direction. I left the internet industry, returned to my hometown, started a children's art school, and became an art teacher.

For many years, I stopped thinking of myself as someone who built things for the web.

So when I opened a code editor again this year, I genuinely did not know whether I could still do it.

The web had changed. The tools had changed. The way software gets built had changed. I had been away for a long time.

I decided to try anyway.

That is how HandyPebble started.

The name came from me, too. It is not the shortest name in the world, and maybe it is slightly unusual, but I liked it immediately.

“Handy” means useful, convenient, something you can reach for when you need it. A “pebble” is small and simple. That combination felt right for the kind of site I wanted to make: small tools that do not pretend to change your life, but might solve one annoying problem at exactly the right moment.

I also thought the name was memorable.

And honestly, what is a domain name for if people cannot remember it?

So I kept it.

The harder question came next: what should I actually build?

At the beginning, I had no real answer. I made a few small web tools. Then I made another one. Finishing one gave me an idea for the next. After that came another.

Projects are strange that way.

Sometimes the hardest part is not the work itself. It is getting the thing moving. Once it starts, it can become like a vehicle that has already picked up speed. You begin to see more problems, more possibilities, more things that could be improved, and suddenly it becomes difficult to stop.

That is more or less what happened with HandyPebble.

What began with a handful of small tools grew, in a little over a month, into a site with more than two hundred pages and applications.

But I no longer think the number matters very much.

In fact, the way I think about the project has changed a lot since the first week.

At first, I thought I was building small tools.

Then I realized that a website made of hundreds of isolated little utilities would eventually become meaningless. It needed structure. It needed systems. Tools needed to relate to one another. Entire sections needed to make sense as useful collections instead of random piles of pages.

More importantly, I needed to think much harder about the person using them.

Why did they arrive on this page?

What are they trying to finish?

How many steps should it take?

Can they understand the interface immediately?

Does it work well on a phone?

Is the result actually useful?

Would they ever come back?

That changed the direction of HandyPebble.

I started moving away from the idea of a “small tools website” and toward something closer to a collection of lightweight web applications.

Some of them still look simple from the outside. A few fields. A button. A result in a few seconds.

But I have come to believe that simple products do not need to be cheaply made.

The interface can be light while the work behind it is heavy.

A page may look effortless while the code, logic, edge cases, design decisions, mobile behavior, printing, export options, and repeated revisions behind it are anything but effortless.

Simple does not have to mean shallow.

In fact, I am becoming increasingly interested in building things that feel small but are built seriously.

That is the direction HandyPebble is heading now.

I am also, in many ways, a fairly ordinary developer living in China.

To be precise, before starting HandyPebble, I probably would not have called myself a developer at all.

My career has never followed a clean technology-industry path.

After graduating from college, I did what many young people in China did at the time: I moved to Shenzhen and worked in a large city. Later, I went back to my hometown and started my own business, a small children's art school.

For a while, it did well.

It was never a huge company, but it gave my family a stable life, gave me work I cared about, and gave me a group of students I was proud to teach.

Then the environment changed.

Beginning around 2019, China's private education and tutoring industry went through major policy and market shifts. My art school was hit harder than anything I had experienced before.

It did not fail.

It is still open today. I still teach art.

But it is no longer the growing, optimistic business it once was.

Enrollment declined. Income fell. The entire industry became more difficult. A life that once felt relatively stable became much less certain.

That experience changed the way I think about work.

You can spend years building something and still discover that the environment around it can change faster than you expected.

So when I began working on websites again this year, it was not only a hobby.

There was another question underneath it.

Could I build something again?

Could I learn a new generation of technology?

Did the design experience I had from many years ago still matter?

Could I become someone who creates internet products again?

I did not know.

So I tested the idea.

What surprised me was how quickly some of the old instincts came back.

I am not a traditional software engineer, but I am very sensitive to products, interfaces, visual hierarchy, interaction, usability, and the overall structure of a website. My years in design had not disappeared. Neither had the observation skills I developed from teaching art.

They simply came back in a different form.

And this time, I had a new kind of tool available to me: AI.

ChatGPT has become an important part of the way I work. I use AI to help me think through problems, write code, review structure, explore product ideas, and move faster.

But I do not think of this as “AI building my website for me.”

I think of AI as a multiplier.

I still decide what to build, why it should exist, what the page should feel like, which features matter, which ones should be removed, whether something is too complicated, whether a user will understand it, and whether a product is worth continuing.

AI helps me turn those decisions into working software much faster than I could before.

That difference matters.

It is also the reason one person can now build and maintain a body of work that would have been much harder to imagine years ago.

There is still a great deal I do not know.

When I run into something I do not understand, I ask ChatGPT. If I am still uncertain, I search Google. If I hit a server problem, I learn about servers. If I run into SEO, I learn SEO. If something breaks across browsers, I investigate browser behavior. If the problem is design, I return to the part of the work I know best.

The amount I have learned in the last month has been intense.

In some ways, it feels like I have learned more in a few weeks than I did in several previous years combined.

HandyPebble is still very small.

The traffic is not impressive. Many of the tools still need improvement. The structure is still evolving. I am nowhere near the point where I would say the site is finished.

I also have no idea how large it will eventually become.

But one thing is becoming clear.

I do not want to stop.

Because I already started.

When you are twenty, starting over feels normal. When you are thirty, it still feels possible. When you reach your forties, time feels different. You become much more aware that there are not an unlimited number of ten-year stretches left to waste.

That makes me more interested, not less interested, in building something that can compound over time.

For me, HandyPebble is the beginning of that.

Maybe one day it will become a large website.

Maybe it will remain a modest independent project on a very large internet.

I do not know yet.

What I can control is the work.

Fewer pointless features.

More useful ones.

Less emphasis on page count.

More emphasis on quality, clarity, design, and user experience.

I want people to arrive at a tool and immediately understand three things:

What it does.

How to use it.

And how to finish what they came to do.

That is the kind of HandyPebble I want to build.

A website made, piece by piece, by one ordinary person sitting in a room in China.

There is no large company behind it.

No team of dozens of people.

No dramatic startup story.

At least not yet.

Just someone who once worked in internet design, later became an art teacher, and eventually found himself sitting in front of a computer again at a different stage of life.

And deciding to try one more time.

I do not know where this will go.

But as long as it keeps moving forward, I intend to keep building.