How I Became a Web Developer

My name is Miracle Emmanuel, and I am from Nigeria. By the special grace of God, I am a web developer — a frontend developer, to be precise.

I started my web development journey around July 2025, and at that time, I was a complete novice.

I began my development journey with Wapaxo.com, a free web-building and hosting platform. I didn't even have a smartphone at the time. I had to start everything with my mum's keypad phone.

How I Started

I was browsing the internet with my mum's keypad phone when I came across a few mobile social media sites. They looked really good, and I became interested in how they were built.

I kept browsing until I came across a post from one of the developers about his social media site appearing on Google.

I searched for it on Google, and surprisingly, it was the first result that appeared in the search results.

But there was one major problem: I knew absolutely nothing about web development.

I had to start with the system templates provided by Wapaxo.com. That was how my journey began.

It was really challenging. I had no experience, no skills, and no knowledge of web development. Still, I kept going despite the difficulties.

I started researching HTML tags and CSS properties, and that was how I gradually began to grow in web development.

My First Websites

At some point, I created a site called gmchat.wapaxo.com, which I intended to turn into my own social media platform.

Wapaxo.com already had its own social media system, where WAPAXO tags could be used alongside HTML and CSS.

However, I couldn't really build the site the way I wanted because I wasn't familiar with WAPAXO tags. Although Wapaxo provided a few tutorials in the admin panel, they weren't even close to covering everything I needed to know.

I remember building several websites around that period.

Some were sports-betting blogs. That was also the period when I became deeply involved in sports betting. I was eager to make an impact in the sports-betting space.

But funny enough, I was an extremely unprofitable punter.

I spent almost a year betting on sporting events, yet I couldn't withdraw even a dime.

That's a story for another day.

I also had a few guys who were learning from me at the time, and they joined my sports-betting blog. I had a gospel website too. Although it was never fully completed, it was one of the websites I loved the most.

However, I had a major problem:

The Opportunity That Changed Everything

Some junior developers started chatting with me after seeing some of my work.

My work was still basic, but they were interested in what I was doing.

At the time, some of them couldn't afford to connect with me properly, but one of them eventually reached out and asked me to help organize his social media website.

I was extremely happy.

He gave me access to his Wapaxo.com admin panel and Gmail account, and I was able to work on his website.

That opportunity became a major turning point for me.

It was during that process that I began to understand how Wapaxo social media websites were actually being built.

I discovered that many developers downloaded WAPAXO social-media themes and uploaded them to their websites. However, I couldn't properly access or understand many of those themes at the time.

So I started learning by studying the codes, pages, and structures I could access.

I discovered more WAPAXO tags, and gradually, I began to understand how everything worked.

That knowledge brought me back to gmchat.wapaxo.com, a project I had abandoned for several months because of my lack of experience and skills.

I started rebuilding it.

The Birth of GmChat

I learned almost every concept I needed to make the platform work, and gradually, gmchat.wapaxo.com became a reality.

Interestingly, the website I had been helping with remained almost exactly as it was — with little or no updates — while GmChat continued to grow.

Today, GmChat has more than 1,400 users, and it became one of the rapidly growing social platforms on Wapaxo.

But the journey wasn't always beautiful.

There were times when the site looked boring because I neglected it for a while.

Some users insulted me and called my social media site all sorts of names. Some criticized the user interface and user experience.

Others created additional accounts whenever their previous accounts were banned for insults or abusive behavior.

At some point, I became discouraged.

I felt like giving up because the insults were becoming too much.

People insulted my creativity, but they didn't know the secret, passion, sacrifices, and struggles behind the reality they were criticizing.

That was one of the hardest parts of the journey.

When People Started Noticing

As I continued improving, people began chatting me up about my mentorship services.

At first, nobody was paying me.

I decided to teach a few people the basics while keeping the deeper fundamentals of my mentorship available for those who were ready to pay for the full training.

By that time, I had started building something more important than just a website:

People from other mobile communities began hearing about GmChat.

Even today, some people in other communities know about the platform.

There were even situations where administrators of other websites blocked some of our officials from registering because of their continuous advertisements encouraging users to join GmChat.

That showed me that the platform had gained some level of recognition.

The Growth

That was how I really started web development. The story is long, but these experiences shaped me into the developer I am becoming today.

I continued.

I kept learning.

I kept building.

I kept improving.

And I kept growing.

Learning never ends.

That has become part of my lifestyle — the lifestyle of a determined, disciplined, and exceptional person.

Moving to Modern Web Development

Eventually, I moved from Wapaxo to Netlify, where I became more familiar with modern web development.

I later moved to Vercel, and that is where I continue my journey today.

My journey has been a great experience.

Although I no longer use Wapaxo.com as my primary development platform, I will never forget what it meant to me.

It was where I started learning.

It was where I made mistakes.

It was where I experimented.

It was where I discovered that I could actually build things.

Neglecting or looking down on that beginning would mean underestimating the foundation that helped shape my prospects and potentials.

I may have moved on to modern platforms, but I will always respect where I started.

Because sometimes, the platform where you begin is not the platform where you will end.

But it may be the platform that gives you the courage to begin.