PlayNow was a streaming website I built when I was 15. It’s long dead now, but it was the project where full-stack first clicked for me.
It ran on server-rendered PHP with a SQL/MySQL database underneath and plain JavaScript on the front end — no framework, just the request/response cycle, queries, and the DOM. Building it meant learning the whole stack at once: how a page gets assembled on the server, how data is modeled and queried, and how the browser ties it together. It wasn’t elegant, but it worked, and it’s the build that made everything after it feel possible.