I started writing this book to teach people how to build websites. Over time, it became more than that. It became a way of pushing back—against complexity, against centralization, against surveillance, against the creeping sense that the web is no longer ours.
We live in a time of deep uncertainty, when even our essential needs often go unmet. Today’s technology and the way we use it is a contradiction. It feels disposable and indispensable, superficial and profound, exploitive and empowering, convenient and constraining. We crave authenticity, but we got AI. We need truth, but we got TikTok. We want to create and connect—instead, we consume and coast.
Sometimes I wonder. Are people using technology, or is technology using them?
In times like these, using technology to learn, create, and contribute is a revolutionary act. What we make now—with our own hands, on our own terms—matters more than ever.
So I’m giving this book away under a Creative Commons license. Not because it has no value, but because the open web has never been more valuable, or more vulnerable.
In a time that breaks
in cutting pieces all around,
when men, voiceless
against thing-ridden men,
set themselves on fire, it seems
too difficult and rare
to think of the life of a man
grown whole in the world,
at peace and in place.
But having thought of it
I am beyond the time
I might have sold my hands
or sold my voice and mind
to the arguments of power
that go blind against
what they would destroy.— Wendell Berry
If you’d like to support this project, you’ll be able to buy a professionally formatted ebook once the book is complete. But you don’t have to. The web version is free, and always will be.
If you find this work useful, share it. Remix it. Make it your own. But let it remind you that the web can still be a place of craft, simplicity, and freedom—where one person can make a difference.
Build your own path. And above all, stay human.
In solidarity,
Matt Cone
June 2025