Starting a Web Development Studio: Why I Did It and What I Have Learned

I never set out to be a web developer. My world was music — composing, collaborating with my sister, chasing that feeling you get when a chord progression finally clicks into place. Code was the furthest thing from my mind.

But somewhere between wanting to share my music and wanting to build something that felt mine, I started learning. A little PHP here. A React component there. Late nights reading docs, breaking things, fixing things, and slowly — very slowly — understanding how it all fits together.

Why a Studio?

I could have freelanced. I could have taken contracts under my own name. But the word "studio" felt right in a way that nothing else did. It carries weight. A studio is a place where things are made — music, art, games, software. It signals intention. It says: this is not a side hustle. This is a creative practice that happens to involve code.

GraveYardJokes Studios started as a name for my creative output — the music, the game development experiments, the illustrations. Adding web development to that felt natural, not forced. Because at the end of the day, every site I build is a creative project. Every client problem is a design problem. Every deployment is a small performance.

What I Build

My stack is Laravel on the backend, React (with Inertia.js) on the front. I gravitate toward clean, fast, opinionated applications — the kind that do one thing well and don't apologize for it. I care about SEO, about accessibility, about the details that most people skip because they're not flashy.

I have shipped e-commerce systems, content platforms, internal tools, and game-adjacent projects. Each one taught me something. Each one made the next one sharper.

The Honest Part

Starting a studio means betting on yourself. Some days that feels electric. Some days it feels like shouting into a void. I am in the early chapters — building the portfolio, finding the right clients, learning how to talk about what I do without underselling it.

But I have been here before. Every song starts as a bad first draft. Every game starts as a broken prototype. You ship the imperfect version, you learn, and the next one is better.

This blog is part of that process. A place to document the journey, share what I learn, and be honest about what building something from scratch actually looks like.

If you are building something too — reach out. Let us figure it out together.