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The Making
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From the archive · Essay

Building a Universe

It doesn't take a team to build the next thing; it just takes a shift of thinking.

Justin Kazmierczak· Oct 8, 2023· 3 min read

Cover photo: Robert Lukeman / Unsplash

Justin KazmierczakJustin Kazmierczak
First published Oct 8, 2023 · Edited Oct 12, 2026 · 3 min read

I entered the development world about 20 years ago at the age of 13. At that time, building applications meant experimenting in DOS and building macros in VBScript, and HTML interactivity was so new that Adobe Flash became the only solution.

It was a tough time for developers who were more engineers than creative entrepreneurs. Developers encountered vastly complicated services and systems built on top of older systems, and web developers were frightened by their clients' infinitely adapting long lists of products and features. A strong, well-respected corporation once hired me as a front-end developer, and I eventually saw myself more as an architect sculpting ambitious designs for clients with big, seemingly impossible ideas.

Next to my dual-screen desktop, my green screen terminal (not an emulator), I had attached foldable tables. Every time a client would call with a feature or an idea, I'd start designing that idea by pushing the stacks of other client projects down the table. Project management at its finest. 😒

The tamed web

Now, the internet has embraced new technologies such as the Fetch API to replace Ajax; Flash and ActionScript are a thing of the past; CSS3.0 supports stunning animations; JavaScript is now a fully featured programming language. With recent technological enhancements from my platform, the web is this tamed ecosystem for Application Artisans to develop creative ideas for their clients. Well, it will be.

Then and now, in the words of the post.

I've spent my 20 years building this dream platform where I can happily code an application without spending an arm and a leg on plugin services that don't connect well. A world where I could go from authentication to payments in just a few lines of code was dauntingly impossible.

Application development requires tremendous backend service knowledge of Amazon's AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, SQL, NoSQL, and your favorite JavaScript framework flavors. Vendors develop unique flavors of proprietary system alternatives that promote accelerated development. Still, programmers dive into hundreds of thousands of lines of code to get a simple note-taking application out the door.

We live in a post-apocalyptic digital world where app development becomes the haunting task of adapting platform-specific APIs in an ever-changing digital landscape to compete from 2-dimensional computing to sophisticated engineering that is spatial computing. Let's not talk about system operations (sysops) or the security concerns network administrators and application developers have long since experienced. An application requires a team of programmers, engineers, UX/UI designers, database architects, and security specialists. Or does it…

A shift of thinking

You are why I'm developing The Universe; it's a platform for developers like me to focus less on the intricate processes of systems engineering and start creating a solution to your customer's needs. It's part of the vision of a future where anyone can be a successful entrepreneur living in Kingdom Principles without limitation.

It doesn't take a team to build the next thing; it just takes a shift of thinking.

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