Reflections on Sharing the Climb
Lately, I’ve found myself in conversations scattered across Slack threads, Discord communities, gchat exchanges, and forums. The questions that come up are often simple at first: What’s a CMS? How is Squarespace different from WordPress? What’s an integration, really?
At the surface these might sound novice, but there’s something deeper going on. You can almost see the gears turning as people start to map their own frame of reference—comparing code to tools they know, comparing a CMS to a gallery, comparing integrations to brushstrokes that connect mediums. The analogies may be imperfect, but they are alive, and that aliveness is what excites me.
The Art of Seeing the Lights Turn On
Talking code with someone new has begun to feel like talking about art. Not just “here’s a function” or “this is how CSS works,” but “here’s a medium, here’s a language, here’s a way of expression.”
And the moments I love most are when the lights switch on. When a new developer experimenting with HubSpot CMS suddenly realizes that HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are not just lines of code—they’re part of a vocabulary. When they connect SEO to visibility, or integrations to collaboration, or templating to storytelling.
Those sparks of understanding are worth everything.
Fifteen Years Up the Mountain
I’ve been climbing this mountain for 15, maybe 20 years. There are plenty of days it feels steep, messy, and relentless. But there are also days like these—where I can turn, look back down the trail, and see others climbing behind me. They’re carrying their own tools, making their own analogies, finding their own rhythm.
And it’s wonderful.
There’s no sense of competition here. Only a recognition that the path is wide enough for all of us, and that the joy comes not just from reaching new peaks, but from sharing what you’ve learned along the way.
Why Labs Exists
That’s what I use these Labs for—not as textbooks, not as encyclopedias, but as leave-behinds. A way to capture the complex, the confusing, or the just-out-of-reach and make it a little more approachable. Sometimes it’s for someone just starting out. Sometimes it’s for someone already deep into code who just needs a new way of seeing.
In every case, it’s about creating artifacts that others can pick up as they climb. A little marker on the path that says: someone was here before you, and here’s what they noticed.
Closing Reflection
What keeps me going in this craft isn’t just the projects I finish or the systems I build. It’s those conversations—those sparks. It’s the joy of seeing someone else catch the bug, feel the excitement, and start to see the web not as a black box, but as a canvas.
That’s the promise I hold onto: that the climb is never just my own, and that the most rewarding part is seeing others rise, step by step, toward their own view from the mountain.