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Rediscovering the Joy of Building from Scratch

When was the last time you built something?

I mean really built it—from scratch.
If you have the materials, the tools, and the know-how, you can make your own furniture. It might take longer than ordering from IKEA, but you’ll get to decide how it looks, how it fits, and what it’s made of. It’ll be yours.

The same idea applies to frontend development.

When was the last time you made a website without using a single framework or library?
No React. No Angular. No Vue.
No Bootstrap. No Material UI.
Just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Most people don’t do that anymore. But they should.

The first thing you notice when you try it is how quiet everything gets. No build system yelling at you. No hot reload flashing errors in red. Just a text editor and a browser. The code you write is the code that runs.

It's not nostalgic. It's clarifying.

You stop thinking in abstractions. You stop trying to fit your layout into someone else’s grid system. You don’t wonder whether the framework is doing something behind the scenes. It isn’t. Nothing’s hiding. Everything’s yours.

I built a fan site for The Matrix like this. Just for fun. Just to see if I still could.

The structure is simple (and boring in the best way):

📁 assets/
  ├── css/
  ├── gif/
  ├── images/
  ├── svg/
  └── webfonts/
📁 components/
  ├── header.html
  └── footer.html
📁 pages/
  ├── home.html
  ├── synopsis.html
  ├── gallery.html
  ├── soundtrack.html
  └── videos.html
📄 index.html
📄 matrix.js
📄 README.md

No bundler. No dependencies. No command to run. You double-click the index.html file and the site loads instantly. Offline. Fast. Lightweight. And it looks good.

Inspired by Apple’s “liquid glass” design language at WWDC25, I added soft blur effects, semi-transparent panels, and smooth animations. The falling green code—done in pure Canvas—adds just enough motion to make it feel alive without being noisy.

It’s not big. It’s not fancy. But it’s done. And it’s mine.

Here’s why this matters.

We spend so much time learning tools that we forget what they’re built on top of. Many developers can write React but don’t fully understand how the DOM works. Or what position: absolute actually does. Or how to make something responsive without a library.

That’s not their fault. It’s just how things are taught now.

But every so often, it’s beneficial to reset. It helps to remember that the web serves as a canvas you can paint on directly. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are more than sufficient. You can create something beautiful, quirky, and useful without relying on 500 packages and a build step.

This project is what it did for me.

If you’re curious, the site’s here: thematrix.andreszenteno.com

Watch the code rain. Tap through the gallery. Let the music play.

And maybe build your next thing the slow way. The manual way.
The way that teaches you something.