Twenty-eight years later, I am still building what does not exist yet
Today I opened an image I had not seen in over twenty years — the homepage of a portal I built before the tools to build it existed.
EDUCANET was an educational portal I built and led between 1996 and 2000, right up until the dot-com bubble burst.
It was not a small project. A team of roughly fifty people, employees and collaborators, producing close to a hundred articles a week. Partnerships with more than thirty schools and universities.
To sustain that volume, there was no ready-made tool. We built a complete content management system from scratch — before WordPress existed. Microinteractions in ASP.NET, JavaScript and Ajax, in 1998.
Sometimes I tell these stories and people think I am making it up. But that is how things worked when the infrastructure we now call standard simply did not exist yet: you architected the system because it had to exist, not because there was a manual for it.
The same logic, a bigger problem
Twenty-eight years later, I am still doing the same thing: building what does not exist because it needs to.
Today that is GOE — labour-market infrastructure that embeds real participation for the people who produce, directly into the architecture of the system. Not a benefit. Not a promise. Part of the design.
In 1998 the problem was that there was nowhere to publish knowledge at scale. Today the problem is that there is nowhere to redistribute value at scale.
Same logic. Bigger problem.
I run fixed-price architecture reviews and infrastructure cost audits for founders. See the engagements, or read the background.