In ten years of building for the web I've written more lines of code and review comments than I can count, and exactly zero blog posts. This post fixes the last number. Here's who I am, why I'm finally writing, and what this blog is going to be about.
Why now?
I've been circling the idea of a blog for a couple of years, but it kept sitting at the bottom of a long list of todos: client deadlines, university, life. I wasn't putting it off, I was working through the list. The list is never really done, but the blog's turn finally came. I have the time and, more importantly, the will.
I won't pretend there's a grand plan here. I don't know how often I'll publish or where this goes. We'll see. But it's what I want to do right now, and that's reason enough.
Who am I?
In April 2016 I walked into the Sofia office of an American outsourcing company as a front-end intern. I got there by walking away from something else: four years of studying transport construction before admitting I'd never work in that field. IT had clicked, the degree hadn't, so I left it unfinished and started over. My world was small: HTML, CSS, enough JavaScript to be dangerous, and a long list of things I didn't yet know I didn't know. I worked out of that office until covid hit in 2020; since then I mostly work from home, still in Sofia.
Ten years later I'm still at the same company, and I know how that sounds in this industry: outsourcing, plus a decade in one place. Here's the part people miss about outsourcing: variety is the advantage. Without ever changing employers, I've shipped ten client projects across seven industries (building materials, digital health, sports media, automotive, beauty education, and more) using four frontend frameworks in production (AngularJS, Angular, React, Next.js) and two CMSes. One client kept coming back for four projects over more than five years, one of them a 4.5-year AngularJS-to-React migration, which means I lived with my own architectural decisions long enough to regret some and defend others: a lesson job-hopping doesn't teach. The full history, with real dates and anonymized clients, is on my CV.
Alongside client work I've spent a lot of time on internal projects and devcamps, usually as a PR reviewer or mentor. Reviewing other people's code (and mentoring people who will soon review mine) is where most of my opinions come from. And few things in this job feel better than watching someone you mentored grow into a professional you now learn from.
These aren't easy times for the sector, or for the company. I'm staying anyway. Not out of inertia, but because I still genuinely enjoy the everyday work: the code, the reviews, the people. The cup of coffee that opens the workday, and the click of the laptop lid that closes it, knowing the team did good work that day.
One more recent thing: ten years after leaving that first degree unfinished, I closed the loop and graduated in computer science, this time while working full-time and raising two kids. The final project is something I'm genuinely proud of. More on that in an upcoming post.
About those two kids: a 9-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son, plus a great wife. I enjoy every bit of time with them, and being a father keeps teaching me things I didn't even expect to learn. Whatever time is left goes to my mountain bike around Sofia, to fishing trips (mostly alone, mostly somewhere new), and now and then to kayak fishing in Greece.
What I plan to write about
Three things, in order of how long they've been part of my life, and one constant:
Building for the web. The ten-year foundation: React, Next.js, TypeScript, headless WordPress and Gutenberg, performance on content-heavy sites. Practical, production-tested, opinionated.
Building for AI. Content platforms are getting a new consumer: machines. Structured content, clean APIs, and content modeling suddenly matter more than ever, and a decade of CMS work turns out to be good preparation for that shift.
Building with AI. How AI tools are changing my day-to-day work: what they're genuinely good at, where they waste my time. Honest takes from real use, not hype in either direction.
Building for the people. Yes, it's a cliche, and maybe a strange one to insist on in the years of AI. I'll insist anyway: people still matter, and the goal at the end is always the same. Make our lives better, easier, and more fun.
And occasionally something that isn't code at all. First candidate: a post about playing Minecraft with my daughter.
That's it. I'm starting. I have no idea where this will go, but I'm full of enthusiasm and I know it's right.
If something here turns out to be useful to you, that's great. If you disagree with something, even better: reach out.