[ love → create → grow → enjoy ]
This page is written freely and will most likely not interest those who do not share these principles. With all respect — these are my principles. I do my best to make sure they never go against other people’s values. And I live by them — these are my life principles.
I’m the Son
I am grateful to my Parents — my Father and Mother, to their Parents, my Grandfathers and Grandmothers, and to the Parents of my Wife.
They gave life to me and to my Wife. And since it was she who introduced me to WordPress (the story on WordPress.org), I publish this page on a site built with WordPress.
We are who we are now. But we could have been completely different, in a different place, in a different role — if anything of what happened had happened another way.
I am the Son of my Parents and the Son of my Wife’s Parents. And that is the best thing there can be in this architecture. Next we move on to patterns and child architecture (that is, to our children) 🙂
I’m the Dad
My greatest achievement is my Children. Everything else is less important.
Many years ago it made me smile:
- When I was working on an analytics project for game releases, my little Son would run up and ask: “Dad, are you playing Minecraft?”
- When I was building a pixel art website for a venture firm (impellent.vc), my Daughter said: “This man looks like my favourite character!” No, sweetheart, this man is a business angel, not a cartoon character 🙂
It always made me happy when a child’s cry in a colleague’s background interrupted our conversation. Not annoyed — genuinely happy.
When the head of the design team cancelled a meeting because her little one was teething.
When, the moment I opened my eyes, I saw a message from a Client written just before taking the kids to school. I replied — and while we were both stuck in traffic taking our kids to school, there was a pause 🙂
All of this is great! To those who have been through it — I am glad for you, and I remember my own moments. And to everyone else, I sincerely wish you such moments in life. Or the ones you want.
I’m the Husband
My Wife is the one and only! She is the Woman who brought two wonderful children into the world and created one more Full-stack WordPress developer: born in 1984 and created as a WordPress developer in 2012 (the story once more).
I’m the Pet owner
I adore my pets: their eyes, their wishes and habits, the clothes I have just put on and that are already muddy, the knock of a bowl from the enclosure during an important call with my favourite Clients. Yes, I named my dog — a Drahthaar, she is a girl — Asana, after the Asana project management system.
Our pets are the ones we have tamed. So even when, before winter, mice move closer to the house and race across the stretch ceilings, we do not put out poison: we switch on repellers and gently toss pillows, knocking on the ceiling in the hope of scaring them away.
To be honest: I step over a little spider that crosses my path. I love, adore and respect them — there is enough room on the planet for everyone.
I’m the Friend
In the most active phase of growing my business, I worked with a huge number of staff, Clients and partners. That is when I learned an important rule: do not rush to clear-cut conclusions based on a situational view and what you happen to know, and do not burn bridges. The world is round, and there is a chance you will meet again — even on different continents.
A few years later you see a commit in the GitLab repository of a corporate site and realise you have seen this avatar before. You scroll through Skype — and find the colleague who, years ago, invited you onto the team of one of the projects. The rule proves itself again and again. And it does not matter if there were some difficult moments in the previous team.
I’m the Neighbor
They say neighbors are close relatives! I love and value mine. These are people I see almost every day: you can borrow something from them or lend something, invite them to watch football over a beer, or ask for advice. That is great.
I’m the Colleague
Colleagues are like neighbors, only even closer 🙂 There are no words for how important and valuable that is.
Once, colleagues were measured in cubic metres of air breathed together in one office. Someone left “notches on the desk”: let you down or covered for you. Someone started to respect you after a corporate party: wiped my face with his tie, put me in a taxi… or the other way round 🙂
Remote work, and covid with it, changed a lot. International teams added their share too. Today it is hard to name the criteria — but sometimes even a single emoji says it all, better than three or four long sentences of text!