@b0rk Back in 2006ish a friend sent me a book called "Building websites with PHP4 and MySQL" (or something along those lines). And I started building. I didn't have a job so I built something that a friend needed. I learned things along the way, like proper indexing of DB tables, etc... It's always felt hard, and it's still hard, but sticking to the most mainstream technologies and not getting lured by shiny objects is a sure way to make things easier.