South Korea astonished us with what deliberate, sustained technological development can accomplish. Here was a country that had transformed its economy and infrastructure within living memory. The speed of its networks, the efficiency of everyday electronics, the visibility of industry and the capacity to coordinate complex systems made an impression on two Jamaicans who had been carrying big designs in their heads for years.

We arrived with a clear intention to use that capacity. Our family media network had evolved from separate websites and public channels. At first we maintained the usual assortment: a site, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and other places to publish. Sher had already imagined a starfish-like media system, different arms of family life growing from one common centre. Korea gave us the fast internet and the long hours of experimentation to pull that concept into a practical WordPress Multisite network.

GoDaddy was one of our early hosts. In that period the subdomains, SSL configuration and growth in media storage kept forcing new decisions. We learned what could be handled by an ordinary website package and what happens when a publisher wants a network instead of one blog. We later worked with WPMU DEV, beginning with hosting allocations that included a fifteen-gigabyte package and eventually demanding more room. There we learned migrations, backups, hosting plans, multisite databases, network-wide users, caching, staging, course delivery and the messy behaviour of plug-ins trying to work together. We began asking what it would take to own the whole media layer ourselves.

The engineering history is visible in our support correspondence. In September 2021 we were already discussing custom gallery-thumbnail behavior that ordinary slider settings would not provide. In 2022 our questions included moving domains, restoring sites and fixing a Multisite homepage whose database registration pointed to the wrong address while its subsites still worked. In early 2023 we were repairing course-media paths after a single-site-to-multisite migration and investigating how to bring BuddyPress features across network boundaries. By 2024 we were deep in custom video layouts, search-indexing semantics, member pages, media restoration and staging limits. A support engineer observed that the network was too large for a convenient ordinary staging restoration. These were productive years of learning exactly what must be controlled if a family intends to publish at scale.

On Jeju Island we also made slow films of the sea, the coastline and daily life, publishing them through Oasis Videos and the family media network. During the pandemic our pages and courses found audiences while enormous numbers of people were indoors. The platform’s own displayed audience and view measurements grew into the billions in our internal record, and we invested in more hosting, global content delivery and local caching through Cloudflare. The scale excited us. I enjoyed seeing the family filmed in Korea and watched by people who would never have been able to visit the island in person.

Step by Step Solar and Trott Bailey University grew alongside this work. The WPLMS learning environment gave us a way to teach solar installation and other disciplines on our own network. We were moving from making classes to engineering the institution in which learning took place. When a piece of software failed to cooperate, we studied it, found the limits of the available plug-ins and increasingly wrote tools ourselves. What later became Big King Media was taking its first practical shape: one family, one media ecosystem, video and image assets connected to the entire publishing life.

Of course Korea also contained difficult months, including pandemic restrictions, immigration complications and eventually separation. That is part of the record. It is equally true that Korea gave us an immense high season of digital invention. The sight of my wife thinking globally while helping us solve technical problems in the middle of family life was intoxicating. Every new tool, every improved course page, every successful migration felt like another expression of our marriage. We came to Korea to build and learn, and we did both.