How I got here.

I taught myself to program at fourteen, for game servers where I was a volunteer. You learn quickly there that nobody cares about the technical reasons a server went down on a Saturday night.

I registered as self-employed in my first year at university and took my first contracts alongside my studies, through to a Master of Science specialising in big data. Those early contracts took me from a property platform, whose back end I rebuilt on my own, to SourceRev, an ad network for game servers, and then to SkinWorld, a virtual item trading platform.

Since 2019 I have been working on the same product: Aptimiz, software that measures agricultural working time. I came in to add features. Then I wrote a processing engine, then took over the architecture, then the servers. It is the experience that taught me the most: over several years, you find out what your technical choices were worth.

Today I run that alongside independent work: a high-traffic marketplace, a payment platform I built, an open source module I maintain. Three very different contexts, and always the same questions: how a system holds when load rises, how it changes without breaking, how someone else can take it over.

From one business to the next: payments, agritech, marketplaces, video games, advertising, property. It was not a plan, but it pays off: the same problems come back from one sector to the next, and you recognise the ones you have already met more quickly.