Why do-it-myself.online
I bought do-it-myself.online for a simple reason: it describes exactly what is happening to me.
I used to be a developer. I started early, in a world where you could feel the machine under your fingers. I loved assembly language — not because it was “hard”, but because it was honest: you could see cause and effect, instruction by instruction.
Then, about 35 years ago, I joined what felt like the future: a legendary Silicon Valley company at the time. And I made a mistake — a mistake that many people consider a promotion. I stopped coding. I became a project manager.
At first, it looked like progress. Then it slowly became dependency.
Dependency is invisible — until it hurts
In the mid-2000s I worked on a telecom invention involving the GSM/SMS world. I was convinced I understood a specific failure mode in the protocol landscape of that era. I could describe what was wrong. I could describe what a better approach should look like. But I could not debug the prototypes myself.
That gap is brutal. When you depend entirely on others to validate what you already know, time becomes your enemy. You lose days, weeks, sometimes months — not because the ideas are unclear, but because you cannot touch the system directly.
I promised myself I would never feel that kind of helplessness again.
Then I met a real builder
In the 2010s I met someone through an engineer who later went on to work at Meta. His name is Frank. He was — and still is — one of the most naturally gifted coders I have met. When a person like that is next to you, your imagination expands. Your ambitions do too.
In 2014 I designed a mobile product concept around contextual ordering. Later, from 2019 onward, I started pushing hard for something I considered inevitable: passwordless systems and better identity experiences.
We did not conquer the world. I fully accept my share of responsibility. But I also learned something essential: visions alone don’t ship. And “diva mode” is not a strategy. If you want to build, you build.
2025: the return to building
At the beginning of 2025, I reached a very concrete decision point with a new startup: either we move forward seriously, or we stop. I didn’t have a minute to lose. I could feel, in real time, that the world was entering a new acceleration cycle.
And then something happened that still feels surreal: AI made it possible for me to return to development — fast.
I have said it many times: it feels like these advances were made for me. Not because I am special, but because I carry a backlog of projects and product visions that spans years — and suddenly the execution cost collapsed.
That’s what do-it-myself.online means: not ego, not isolation — but direct contact with execution.
Why write here if I already have other blogs?
Because I need a place that is not “a project page” and not “a private notebook.” I divide my writing into three zones:
- Project-specific writing lives inside the websites of my projects or companies. When a post is meant to explain a product, a roadmap, or a public proof-of-concept, it belongs there.
- Private writing exists too — posts for loved ones, family reflections, things I do not want to amplify publicly. Those have their own quiet home somewhere else on the internet.
- Everything else belongs here: ideas, experiments, opinions, observations, prototypes, cooking, strategy, politics, technology, absurd micro-projects, and the occasional obsession.
This “everything else” zone can be calm — or intense. I care deeply about democratic values and I have strong positions against authoritarianism, propaganda, and the industrialization of disinformation. Sometimes I’ll write about that. Other times I’ll write about vegetables, bicycles, or a completely new idea — like launching a small mobile sauna concept with my wife for our village.
The point is: this is the platform I was missing.
Long live do-it-myself.online.
