It’s my birthday today, so this week’s a bit different — less about your website, more about where the way I build it came from. I spent part of the morning not at the desk but somewhere further back: a bedroom in the 1980s, in front of a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, typing a program in from the back of a magazine.
If you had one, you’ll remember it. Rubber keys that went warm under your fingers. Forty-eight kilobytes of memory — less than a single photo on your phone holds now. You loaded games off a cassette tape, waited four minutes while the screen screeched and the border flickered in stripes, and half the time got “R Tape loading error” for your patience.
Most kids loaded the games and played them. I typed the listings in by hand — line by line, character by character, an hour of careful copying for a program that might not even run. And when it did run, when the little block finally moved across the screen because I’d told it to, that was the feeling. Not playing someone else’s game. Making the machine do something it wasn’t doing a minute before.
I didn’t know it then, but the whole career had arrived early.
Twenty-six years of building websites followed, and the instinct never changed — build the thing yourself, make it do what you actually need. What changed was the tooling, mostly for the worse. Rented platforms. Subscriptions stacked on subscriptions, each one promising freedom and quietly adding weight. Somewhere in the middle of all that, the making got buried under the renting.
The machine changed a hundred times. The instinct never did — make it do something it wasn’t doing before, and own the result.
Then, early last year, I opened a blank conversation with an AI and started typing again. I didn’t know Python. I didn’t know any of the modern tools. But I’d been typing instructions into machines since I was a boy, and the discipline turned out to be exactly the same. The magazine listing became the conversation. BASIC became Python. One instruction at a time, until the thing ran. The system I build everything on now — Claude Code — is a long way from a Spectrum, and it’s the same bedroom, really. Same kid, still copying it in line by line to see what the machine will do.
Here’s why I’m telling you this on a newsletter that’s usually about your business and not mine.
When you hire someone to build your shop or your site, none of this shows up on the call. But it’s the whole difference. The person who learned to build by making a machine obey — who owns the result instead of renting it — builds you something you own too. The one who learned by recolouring a template hands you something you’ll be renting for as long as it exists.
That’s the thread through everything I write. It’s why I moved every site I run onto boring, owned, proven technology instead of the fashionable rented kind — what an Astro website actually is. It’s why I walked away from WordPress rather than keep paying to patch it — how I got off Elementor and WordPress. And it’s why I’d sooner make a page you already have work harder than sell you a shiny new one — the power of retrofitting.
None of it came from a course. It came from a rubber-keyed machine in a bedroom and a kid who wanted to make it do something new.
10 PRINT. 20 GOTO 10. Round it comes again — another year, still building.
Tony Cooper
We Build Stores
tony.cooper@webuildstores.co.uk
07963 242210
P.S. If you had a Spectrum too — or a Commodore, a BBC Micro, an Amstrad, whatever machine you first made do something it wasn’t doing before — hit reply and tell me what you built on it. No pitch, no agenda. It’s my birthday and I’d genuinely love to hear.
