15 years of usmanity.com

It was the last day of 2009, last day of the 2000s and I had just come back home from working at the warehouse. The whole past week I had been thinking so hard about my life and what I wanted to do next. I had been out of high school for almost a year and a half so I was starting to feel this anxiety come over me. During the workday of mundane warehouse work, I kept thinking there's gotta be a way for me to do something more enriching, something that pays more, and something I'd want to do longer term. That day I wasn't even thinking of buying a domain and during the week, I was just mainly thinking about what I could do as someone who liked computers.

The thought that I still remember changed my trajectory in life was when I realized I could just go home and look up what a software engineer does, what people at companies like Google do, and how much money they make. It's easy to forget that even in 2009, not everyone had a smartphone with fast internet. I don't remember distinctly what phone I had and it doesn't really matter because I didn't have access to my phone while working in the warehouse so the thoughts just kept coming back to me. Should I learn a programming language? Can you even learn that without a college degree? What is a job that a programmer does? All these seemingly obvious questions now but at the time, as a young adult, I didn't have any role models who would push me into this world.

Kristen had suggested I look into learning programming and potentially what jobs come from that. It's wild that for two young people who aren't exposed to the tech world, software engineering seemed like some far-fetched work that very smart people did and not someone who had an average GPA in school.

So, it was December 31st, 2009 and I was itching to do something with my life. I knew that I wanted a website, I wanted to learn how to make websites and I wanted to practice. I did the thing that I thought would be a good idea, I bought the domain that was based on my username I had just recently started using "usmanity" in most places. Before this, I used to use the "usman6" username, which is my last name plus the month I was born, very boring.

Now, 15 years and looking at all the things that have happened in my life, good and bad, ups and downs, this domain has been steadily sitting there. I use the main domain as my homepage and the blog subdomain for this. For awhile, I had some other subdomains for small projects but most of those have moved to being subdomains of mhmd.us.

Domains are an interesting thing in the 21st century, they're some of the most valuable commodities and also some of the least because the value comes from what you do with them. There's $10 domains and $10 million domains. I'm very happy and proud of having a domain that I've stuck with and this is a love letter to my 19 year old self for doing something for our future. 💌