The Saint of Silicon Valley

How a Carlo Acutis, a teenage coder, became a founding father of digital evangelization

There are a lot of articles written about Carlo Acutis.

And rightfully, most of them focus on the most critical aspects of his life: his Faith, his virtue, and his love.

But there’s an aspect of his life.

Perhaps a hidden aspect…that warrants a deeper view.

His coding achievements.

As someone who began web development for evangelization around the year he passed, I thought it would be helpful to paint a portrait of the ‘ancient’ digital world in which he lived.

Before Instagram apostles and YouTube priests, before “influencer” was even a thing, he basked in the glow of a CRT.

A teenager with bushy hair, beat-up Nikes, and a Rosary tucked in his pocket.

And while most of us were torrenting music on Kazaa or mastering Counter-Strike, he was hand-coding pages and wrestling with browsers, because he wanted the world to meet Jesus in the Eucharist.

By fifteen, he’d launched a full-scale online exhibition of Eucharistic Miracles. Two decades later, it’s still touring the world—because he didn’t just post content; he built infrastructure. (Miracoli Eucaristici)

This was the IE6 era—quirks mode, broken box model, and CSS floats that collapsed without clearfix hacks.

DevTools were primitive; debugging meant alert() and guesswork. If you shipped a modal gallery, you wrote it yourself. If your layout was consistent, it’s because you measured every pixel and knew how each browser lied to you.

Deployment wasn’t a one-click CI/CD. It was FTP. ASCII vs. binary. CHMOD on folders. One bad .htaccess , and the whole site threw 500s.

You learned as much about servers as about CSS.

So when we say “a kid built a global digital exhibit,” understand the lift.

He wasn’t propagating templates. He was designing an information architecture, normalizing content, and building navigation that scaled to hundreds of pages across multiple languages back when UTF-8 still broke on you at 2 a.m.

The exhibition you see today traces back to that architecture.

Carlo’s site wasn’t a brochure; it was a museum.

A museum with a mission.

Each page was curated: miracle, place, date, Church approval, source. Image assets were optimized by hand so a 56k modem could still reach the mystery. He practiced ‘progressive enhancement’ before it was a buzzword: get the content to everyone, then layer on whatever gloss the browser can handle.

For him, user experience, the ‘removal of friction’, was an act of charity.

Fast pages respect the visitor’s time.

Clear structure respects the mind.

And beauty respects the heart.

He wrote clean code not for a linter score but because order serves contemplation.

No Stack Overflow. No Git. No Bootstrap. No React. No Copilot.

Every include, every stylesheet, every nav update—intentional. If something broke, he fixed it by reading the source and trying again.

In today’s terms, he wore every hat: content strategist, IA designer, front-end dev, back-end tinkerer, release engineer.

In 2004, we’d have just called him a techie.

Today, a techie Saint.

Silicon Valley optimizes for “time on site.” Carlo optimized for time in prayer.

In encounter.

He saw the internet not merely as a network of machines but as a network of souls.

Each HTTP request a person.

In that frame, performance budgets become moral choices.

And when the tools fight you, as they sure did in 2004, you decide whether frustration becomes cynicism…or sacrifice.

The tools got easier; but the mission didn’t. We have frameworks, pipelines, clouds, and AI. Yet the hardest part remains: publishing truth with love, clarity, and courage.

Carlo proved you can be deeply technical and deeply faithful, that the same mind that contemplate a CSS cascade can live a life of prayer.

Today, the Church declared him a saint; but for those of us who live between terminal and tabernacle, he’s already become our role model..

Our patron.

Our Saint.

Carlo Acutis, internet evangelist, coder, and Saint of Silicon Valley.

Please pray for us.

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You have my heartfelt thanks for your generosity and support and please keep me in your prayers, and know of mine for each of you. God Bless, Jeff