Elias Warren
New member
- Joined
- Jul 29, 2026
- Messages
- 1
- Points
- 0
Hey!
My name's Martin. I was born in Ukraine, ended up under occupation in 2014, and made it to government-controlled territory in 2019 (COVID, lucky guy). In 2022 I had to flee the city I'd moved to. Then in 2024 I had to flee Ukraine entirely – 12 days on foot through the mountains with a friend, hiding from drones, helicopters, border guards with dogs. The last two days we slept out in the open, a few hours at a time. In 2026 I left the continent and moved to Uruguay, which is where I'm writing this from.
I've been in development for 10 years now. Started with Delphi and C#, messed around with reverse engineering on the side. Then one day on some forum I saw a guy who'd set a naked girl as his avatar – "heeelll yeah", I liked it, wanted to hit like on it. Problem was, the forum ran XenForo 1, and that feature didn't exist. So I built it. Published it. Built something else, published that too. Orders started coming in, and that's how I ended up in web dev.
Now that I've finally made it to Uruguay and can think about something other than keeping my family safe, I launched my web studio. It's not going great so far. There's this feeling that I missed the prime window for this kind of work, that I lost my edge somewhere along the way. It's been almost a month since launch and I haven't landed a single new client. I'm not giving up on it though – trying to get into different communities, become part of something again, find my footing.
By the way, I'm adding free tools to my site right now to pull in some traffic. If anyone's got ideas for what would be useful, send them my way.
Cheers
My name's Martin. I was born in Ukraine, ended up under occupation in 2014, and made it to government-controlled territory in 2019 (COVID, lucky guy). In 2022 I had to flee the city I'd moved to. Then in 2024 I had to flee Ukraine entirely – 12 days on foot through the mountains with a friend, hiding from drones, helicopters, border guards with dogs. The last two days we slept out in the open, a few hours at a time. In 2026 I left the continent and moved to Uruguay, which is where I'm writing this from.
I've been in development for 10 years now. Started with Delphi and C#, messed around with reverse engineering on the side. Then one day on some forum I saw a guy who'd set a naked girl as his avatar – "heeelll yeah", I liked it, wanted to hit like on it. Problem was, the forum ran XenForo 1, and that feature didn't exist. So I built it. Published it. Built something else, published that too. Orders started coming in, and that's how I ended up in web dev.
Now that I've finally made it to Uruguay and can think about something other than keeping my family safe, I launched my web studio. It's not going great so far. There's this feeling that I missed the prime window for this kind of work, that I lost my edge somewhere along the way. It's been almost a month since launch and I haven't landed a single new client. I'm not giving up on it though – trying to get into different communities, become part of something again, find my footing.
By the way, I'm adding free tools to my site right now to pull in some traffic. If anyone's got ideas for what would be useful, send them my way.
Cheers