About me
Strap in for a tale.
I was born in Burgas, Bulgaria. I graduated in "Saints Cyril and Methodius", specializing in English and
History. After several years of managing an illegal awesome WoW server during high school, I
started developing a keen interest in programming, as I picked up bits of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and
MySQL along the way. Since everybody insisted programming went hand in hand with maths, and I sucked at
that, I figured I'd become a lawyer or a designer. The Internet was shady on getting started back then, and
all the Bulgarian programming books told me the same, so I kind of settled on the idea.
Then, at random, at the end of 11th grade I picked up a book — Teach Yourself C (the Bulgarian version). A curious thing: no maths in this book. I gobbled it up.
I downloaded SUSE Linux for about a week and burned it on 6 CDs. It was my first Linux box, and of course I broke the distro during the first week, so I spent most of the time focusing on gcc/g++. I got into Plovdiv University's Mathematics and Informatics bachelor course (oh, the irony) and survived for about a year. I then moved on to Informatics, and onto Software Technologies and Design, without anything actually feeling useful. I never finished any of those, and I don't think I will.
Meanwhile I started as a PHP developer in Plovdiv. I always did full-stack development, as I found the most joy in making a whole thing that works. I moved through companies, picking up skills, knowledge and friendships. I rose from junior to mid to senior, and started leading teams. I became a CTO several times, tutored over a hundred people, and changed technologies more than once — from LAMP + jQuery to full-stack JavaScript with Angular, React and Vue, and Go and JavaScript on the backend.
This garden
I wanted a blog for ten years and was never pleased with any of the options. I started one in PHP, then Hugo, then discovered Astro in 2021: statically generated, happy with Vue/Svelte/React, and markdown. That was it.
Short-form content lives in Payload, a headless CMS, and every save triggers a rebuild on Cloudflare. The colours are whichever theme you pick from the palette menu; the content is the point.