I learned to code by making things move in Flash.

It started with Flash.

Back then, if something moved on a website, it was probably Flash. Sites had loading bars, spinning logos and a “Skip intro” button.

I learned to code writing ActionScript to animate things, one tween at a time. It was one hell of a way to learn.

A studio, straight out of college.

I finished engineering at SSN College of Engineering in 2009, and four of us from college started a web studio, The Connectorz: Livin Senan, Bragadeesh, Pandiarajan and me. It was completely Livin’s idea.

We even built our own office. Inside it, we turned Photoshop designs into web pages and built WordPress sites.

You could buy your way up Google.

We did SEO too, the organic kind. But black hat was the craze. Companies like PayPerPost and InLinks sold links on other people’s sites, and link building was the big market.

Then Google released Panda in February 2011 and Penguin in April 2012, two updates that went after thin pages and bought links. Most of that market was gone.

We watched all of it happen, quietly.

Fifteen years later it’s starting again, this time with AI. People call it AEO and GEO: getting ChatGPT to mention you. There’s already a market for it.

The other side of the screen.

At LIV I stopped building what people saw. I worked on what made their messages arrive: the server behind a chat app, carrying every message from one phone to another.

Under the hood it was ejabberd, written in Erlang, speaking XMPP. Functional programming, after years of ActionScript and PHP.

We were told it was the same stack WhatsApp ran on.

MeanwhileIn February 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion.

Sven.

In 2015 I went freelance as Sven Creations and started selling website templates on ThemeForest. By then Flash was fading, and the web moved in CSS and JavaScript.

Almost half of them came from one template.

MeanwhileIn January 2015, YouTube made HTML5 its default video player, instead of Flash.

The one that almost worked.

In 2016 I found an After Effects template by Mnemonick that I loved. I asked if I could rebuild it for the web. He said yes.

I rebuilt it in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, on a little animation library I wrote on top of GSAP. GSAP cost me about $200 a year back then; it’s free now.

GSAP, funnily enough, started life as an ActionScript library. The tool that once moved things in Flash was now moving mine in a browser.

Other people’s stores.

But I was broke, and in late 2017 I took a 9-to-5 at TING. Over five years I ended up leading the eCommerce team, building Shopify and WordPress stores for brands like these.

• Wellbeing NutritionA custom Shopify theme from Adobe XD designs. Built solo.↗
• The Co-BeingA wellness and beauty brand, built from scratch on Shopify.↗
• Shores of LociA one-page WordPress site for a VR puzzle game.↗

Built while I was at TING. Some have been redesigned since.

Stomp kept going on the side, and later so did codeinshopify.com, a small blog with free tools for Shopify developers.

MeanwhileIn July 2017, Adobe announced that Flash would be switched off at the end of 2020.

A website, then everything around it.

In 2022 I joined Amura Health to look after their website.

But a website doesn’t end when someone clicks a button. Then comes everything after it: the forms, the tracking, the people who have to reply, the systems that have to talk to each other.

Somewhere along the way, looking after a website became looking after everything around it. That’s my work today, and lately a lot of it has AI inside.

MeanwhileThat November, ChatGPT came out.

Small, weird, useful things.

On weekends I build small experiments and put them on whatsfizzy.com. No login, no spam.

So far there’s Cabinet 2026, where you pick your dream state cabinet and share it as a poster, and Tamil Nadu’s elections in numbers.

Full circle.

I started by making things move in Flash: layers, timelines and hours of getting the timing right. Now AI makes things move from one sentence, including what Stomp tried to do: words animated to music, turned into a video.

ActionScript, CSS, GSAP, APIs. Everything I spent years stitching together is becoming a prompt.

The Stomp template hasn’t been updated since 2021. It still runs on an old version of GSAP. It still works.

The tools have changed. Almost everything has. But I still get the same feeling when something I imagined finally moves on a screen.

So I’m still building. Right now, something new.

You’ll recognise it when you see it.