Leaving school, I always knew that I wanted to be in tech. I got myself an apprenticeship doing some boring software engineering work. After a year, I moved onto a company that sold... toilets, yes, boring still. I was dipping my toes in backend programming languages SQL, .NET, C#, Crystal Reports – It was good, and I definitely got the hang of things, but my 3 years at this company resulted in me slowly hating the backend side of code. With the entire company built on a deprecated 10-year-old system, there wasn't much scope to explore new horizons in my coding venture.

One day, I came across some interesting resources which highlighted the progressive pace of the frontend coding world. For those who don't know what frontend is, it's essentially the technology that the end-user interacts with such as page styling, animations, client-side behaviour, form logic, basically all the fun stuff. Stuck in a dead-end backend database job and seeing these innovative new ways to engage in the coding world was very appealing to me. So without further ado, I made an effort to adopt some frontend skills, and after a few months of prep, off I went to seek a new career path.

I landed an interview at a small digital agency in Manchester, in which the senior dev asked what I'd like to build in my spare time. I'd mentioned to him my involvement in music, and right then and there on the spot, I blurted out that I'd like to make a music magazine. This had crossed my mind before, but I'd never taken it seriously, I guess I was just trying to show ambition in my character in an attempt to get the job. 

So here I was, a junior frontend developer on a journey. After a few months of being in my new role, I'd had some time to consider what I might want to do in building a magazine. I knew 2 things for certain – One was that I wanted to help promote new and upcoming artists, and the other was that I absolutely 100 billion percent would refuse to use a website builder for my magazine. Nothing against services like WordPress, and Wix, but I wanted this to be a project coded from the ground up.

The first version of Rendah Mag was so bad that it never made it to an actual domain. I'd been playing around with this new frontend library called React.js, which since has been adopted by companies like Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and all the big shot companies, so in hindsight, it was a good call, but at the time I had no idea what I was doing.


I'd attempted to reverse engineer some example projects online and even got to grips with something called Mongo DB to handle the data input itself. It worked okay, but managing content to any sort of scale was nothing short of a failure. If there was an article that needed updating, I would essentially have to log in to the backend database and hand-tweak the fields from a huge JSON file. This was a huge problem, how am I meant to take launching a magazine seriously when it takes me 20 minutes to change the smallest thing in an article?

So let's skip about 10 months ahead. Yes, it actually took me this long to get comfortable with these new technologies to a point in which I was happy and ready to go. I bought the domain, deployed the site, and sat joyfully at my magazine with a total of 0 articles, end of story... Oh wait, we need to actually run this thing now, shit.

Mapping out a vision for something that you're not completely sure of is a task, but looking back, it really did plant the seed for what is now my most ambitious project. First thing first, we needed some content. 

At this point, I was getting to grips with my new-found love for halftime drum & bass, and if there was ever a need for online publication on something that was underrated and overlooked, this was it. I hit up a few close friends in the music game, and we started planning some content for the website, here we go.

We set up the social media, designed a quick logo, got some initial articles up, and off we went, Rendah fucking Mag. If there was a limit to how many embarrassing mistakes you can make when starting a magazine, I'll bet that we hit it. Our early vision for what Rendah Mag could be clouded our attention to detail, we had so many grammar mistakes, coding issues, social sharing bugs, it was a rough few months to iron everything out.

Luckily for me, our small team was on the ball. None of us were writers before, more just advocates for the music, but we slowly improved our skills, and before we knew it, people were actively engaging with our content across socials. It's an amazing feeling to have something that took so long finally start to get attention.

The initial page load is a mere 3.3MB, with a 1.08s loading time. I'm pretty happy with those numbers. To do this, we're actively compressing images using our CMS + a custom webhook that applies TinyPNG. We're also Lazy Loading any off-screen components, and making sure everything is specifically fine-tuned to the the user's device size.

Reviewing the analytics, it's clear we're getting some consistent traffic. Making sure that we're catering to the right audience has been key.

It's nice to see a wide-spread reach for the Magazine. We're getting a lot of traffic from places we never imagined. Lot's coming from the states too, which is a pleasant surprise.

Since we started, we've slowly drifted from being strictly a halftime-focussed magazine. There's so much more to explore in underground music, and we're excited to extend our vision going forwards. This is just the start, and we intend to keep on growing. Thank you for reading! ❤️

I've been wanting to document this for some time to express the blood, sweat, and fears that have gone into building something scalable from absolutely nothing.

30 years ago, having a website for your business was something massively overlooked, and probably for good reason. In the early days of the internet, why would scaling businesses give focus to this new technology, and furthermore, why would it have been prioritised given its uncertainty? Today more than 85% of businesses have a website, and for many, it's a primary factor of making sure that their operations can scale and provide the highest satisfaction to their customers.

Well, let's take a step back, I shouldn't have to explain the importance of a website in 2021, but I thought I'd at least kick off this article with some metrics. I'm also pretty certain we're not the first 'online blog' you've encountered. Regardless, I'm going to share some insights into the short history of rendahmag.com, as I've been wanting to document this for some time.

A short history of Rendah Mag (posted 2021)

Hold up!

Rendah Mag

Print Timeline