The history of this website

I have always struggled my way through school by writing my own tutorials.

Textbooks were very dry, contained lots of irrelevant information to comb through, and did a terrible job actually explaining information.

I actually wanted to learn something. At the same time, I knew school didn’t care: they just wanted you to write the right answers to the right questions on a standardized test.

So writing my own tutorials was the answer. They only contained what you needed to know to get a good-enough grade. At the same time, they explained it in a completely different way, one that was more interesting and exciting.

When I was forced to go university, this practice basically became … professional. I never read a book for any of my courses in Mathematics. I looked at old exams, figured out what a professor was most likely to ask, and wrote a comprehensive tutorial on “how to survive course X”.

After a while, everyone in my year started using this. I started adding colors, design elements, a fixed structure. If there was any spelling mistake in my document, I’d hear it within a few days from another student I barely knew 😂 When I left the university, I received a cake as thank-you for the tutorials spanning the whole bachelor of Mathematics.

And so it begins

This website started as my way to share this with the world. And to write tutorials about other topics.

In 2015, I spent roughly 3–4 months designing the original layout. Mind that this was on top of my study and my other projects. (I already did some freelance creative work at that point.)

I used the only thing I knew—and the most common thing at that point in time—PHP and MySQL. I manually wrote the HTML for each tutorial. Then I put that into a database, together with some basic metadata like “category” and “course order” (to know the order in which tutorials should appear).

The site looked amazing. It worked fine. The tutorials started bad but became a lot better as time went on, as I gained experience. I worked on it almost full-time for 6 months. The best courses were the last 5–10 I created, which I deem of such high quality that I never want to take them off the internet 🔥

The Pandaqi brand

Around 2018-2019 my work in game development picked up. I created a few projects that received some recognition. I was asked to work on a project, where all contributors would be clearly mentioned. As such, I had committed to using the name “Pandaqi” from now on.

This created problems. Where to put my game studio work? Where to put the devlogs I always write for my games?

I moved this website to pandaqitutorials.com. (It used to be the main domain, i.e. pandaqi.com)

I changed absolutely nothing else, even though I knew the old system was terrible. I didn’t have the time.

Becoming a professional

Fast forward a few years. Pandaqi now has a lot of games under its belt. Its blog and studio website are huge. I’m actually selling games for money—and, even more surprising, people are buying them.

And still … the tutorial website had more visitors and search hits per day 🙃

I kept lugging this website with me, from server to server, domain to domain. Like baggage. Like dead weight. And somehow, people kept coming back to this terrible first-try at a tutorial website.

After lots of doubts and reconsidering, I decided to keep the website, but migrate it to a way better (future-proof) system.

I knew this would take some time. I was still disappointed when it took 3 full weeks.

I had to …

Download all the original files and database content
Rewrite the whole website from scratch as a static website (using Hugo)
Copy-paste and modify all the HTML articles into clean Markdown. Including all the extra features this website had (like code examples with an image of the output right next to them)
Read through all the content and rewrite the parts I thought weren’t good enough. (More like scanning, though, as it was too much to edit at once.)

I spread it out across 3 weeks, doing other work in the meantime, because it was such mind-dulling work. Yes, I’ve learned my lesson. Be smart with your code, your systems, your techniques when creating a huge project. I won’t make that mistake again.

But in the end, the website went back online as part of Pandaqi: pandaqi.com/tutorials

Almost all the old content was there, albeit heavily improved. The layout was much cleaner. The site was faster and easier to navigate. It was connected, both through visuals and content, with the rest of the Pandaqi brand. And most importantly: adding new content is now easy enough that I might actually do it in the future.

I have to laugh at the naïveté of my younger self. At the incompetence, yet complete confidence in such a project, that lead to a huge website that’s basically impossible to update or change. At the nuggets of wisdom I could already find in tutorials from when I was barely 18, or the “recommendations” I gave readers that are, as I know now, absolutely stupid.

It feels, in many ways, as the point at which I finally become old, wise and professional. Almost all my old projects—both websites and games/stories—have now been improved to a high standard and published. This was one of the last steps. The one I kept putting off, because the website was just so huge and so badly coded.

But now we’re here.