I've been building websites since I was 14.

It started with a friend's server. I didn't really know what I was doing, I just wanted to see if I could make something show up on a screen. That was enough to get me hooked.

By the time I got to university, I was already freelancing. Building sites, learning by breaking things, picking stuff up from people who were better than me. I'd sit next to designers in local studios and watch how they worked. Not just what they did, but why. That mattered more to me than any lecture.

Uni didn't last. Too much structure, too much "because that's how it's done." I needed to figure things out my own way, by doing them. So I dropped out, kept building, and never looked back.

I've never been employed in this field. Fifteen years of freelancing, from day one. Finding my own clients, solving my own problems, taking full responsibility for the work. That's the only way I've ever done it.

I shoot film. Picked it up last year because I needed something deliberately slow and analog, away from screens. 36 frames on a roll, every one costs money, no deleting and retrying. It forces you to pay attention before you press the button. I like that.

I read a mix of things. Some science fiction, some biography and history. I'm less interested in dates and battles and more in how things actually changed for people. The social and economic side of what happened and why it mattered. Some personal development too, when it's not the self-help kind.

I set up a homelab recently because I wanted to understand infrastructure at a deeper level. Same reason I started building websites as a kid. Curiosity and the satisfaction of making something work.

I grew up in Sighișoara, a small medieval town in Transylvania where Romanian, Saxon, and Hungarian cultures all layered on top of each other. Now I live near Cluj-Napoca, which is the opposite. Big, fast, crowded. I'd like to find somewhere quieter in Romania eventually. More space, less noise.

I also post weird memes sometimes. Fair warning.

Too many freelancers build sites that only they can maintain. Some do it by accident. Some do it on purpose so the client can't leave. I've inherited enough of these messes to know the difference.

Agencies sell you a senior developer and hand the work to a junior. Developers hold clients hostage through technical complexity that didn't need to be there. And lately, AI-generated templates get passed off as custom work by people who couldn't build the thing properly without it.

I use AI tools myself. They're useful, but there's a difference between using AI to augment your work and using it to skip understanding the work entirely. If you can't build it without the tool, you can't fix it when the tool gets it wrong.

I don't think most of the bad practices in this industry are malicious. I think they're lazy. People default to what's fast and profitable instead of what's right for the client. And because most clients can't tell the difference, nobody pushes back.

I push back. Not because I enjoy the argument, but because I've spent 15 years learning why things should be built a certain way, and I care too much about the outcome to keep quiet when something's heading in the wrong direction. I'm also happy to be wrong, but "just because" has never been a good enough reason for me.

I specialize in WordPress. Eight years deep in it, backed by broader knowledge of server infrastructure, Docker, automation. Most WordPress developers don't touch that layer. It means I can handle things other specialists can't.

I work async. Email and text, not calls. Not because I'm antisocial, but because a written answer is clearer, you can reference it later, and neither of us has to schedule anything. It's a better way to communicate for the kind of work I do.

I build things so my clients can handle small changes themselves. I don't create dependency. But I'm there when it actually matters, and some of my clients have been with me close to a decade because of that.

I'm pragmatic, but I won't cut corners. I'll find the simplest solution that does the job right. And if your idea is going to make your site worse, I'll tell you before you spend the money.