Everyone remembers their first "Aha!" moment in web development. For a lot of us, it didn't happen in a complex local terminal environment; it happened in a browser.
Maybe you were searching for "how to test HTML CSS JS online" and stumbled into a basic code playground. You changed a background color to "red," saw the preview update instantly, and realized you could actually build things for the web.
Online IDEs have always been the gateway to frontend development. Even today, as experienced engineers, we still rely on JavaScript playgrounds to rapidly prototype ideas, test snippets, or share solutions.
I’ve been building NitroIDE to serve as a modern, distraction-free browser IDE for exactly these moments, but it got me feeling nostalgic.
What was the very first thing you ever built in a browser-based code editor? Was it a messy personal website, a broken CSS animation, or a calculator app? Let's share some stories.