I was born in Rotterdam (my parents met there, father was a Welder and mom worked in chocolate factory). Got my first computer Pentium 386 and DoS game Prince of Persia. Back then it costed about 4000+ Gulden (not Euro). 

During childhood I worked as a cucumber organizer in NL farm houses with Moroccans, and later as a shelf boy. Early childhood ADHD was discovered and they moved me to a school for "children with attention disorder.." which only amplified and did not help (from what I can remember and what my parents told me).

We moved back to Croatia when I was about 16, once home I entered the Graffiti community and started bombing the city (not literally, bombing is a style of graffiti). In this time we were partying every weekend and nobody literally nobody had a "founder" urge in them. It was all Rave. Later I found out the best of us opened their own private Tattoo studio and are doing great today as true artists. 

Once puberty was over, I started as a tour guide for Dutch people in Dubrovnik in 2002. This was cool as I knew Dutch, and there were many Belgians who preferred Dutch. I would pick them up at the hotel and talk all day - I loved talking.

Creme de la creme was to become an engineer and work for a great company (this is what everyone told you). I graduated Comp. Sci in Split (https://eng.fesb.unist.hr/) in 2006 but could not find work (a recession they said..). No company needed me, and nobody cared even then about my diploma. One company (Ericsson) asked for the diploma and were very strict. They got a whole team of phycologists as well on the meeting (after doing a tricky C lang test with double pointers and all that shit). They concluded I was not the right fit for their culture :) 

So I tried finding free work and it worked (a few times in my life so far: when you search for free work it is never really free for always).

I started my first job for a Swiss co with headquarters in Split, tech stack was Qt/C++ and jQuery for the web. As the youngest they gave me web ownership (IE6 debugging was not fun, jQuery had it's PMF with the Ajax functions and DOM traversal). During that time I paired up with my co-worker for an opportunity and we build a paper digitalization system for NL company Riwal - Croatia offices (the one with the cranes) in Qt with custom C++ server and client. Cloud servers were starting to be a thing for them soon after and they still had physical servers for many offices. The product died first slowly and then immediately.

During this time I also builded static sites for apartment rentals, one local even paid me with a roasted Lamb meal instead of money. If was fun to just transfer the files via TotalCommander FTP.

On the health side, I started doing BJJ, broke my hand-carpal bones in 2010 at match. and then stopped doing BJJ. More products as opportunities came across, like a football management app, which later did not deliver on promises. 

We got kids, so I had to find something stable. Fast forward I did change a few companies, until they put me on one of those projects that are boring, the ones where you need 2 laptops, VPN, some weird old VCS and a printed out a block of manuals. The work revolved around configuration of an existing project and I hated it...nothing todo of my own and unleash creativity.

I remember coming home depressed of that routine, and then started searching for an escape hatch. I went on the lookout with connection I knew and my talkative liberal nature helped a bit (and I didn't care what people think of me). And since 2017 I do contracting for US based companies.

Last year (2025) I broke my back (L5-S1 extrusion) and had one of those minimal invasive spine surgeries (private clinic). If it helps, please do not put a shiatzu massager on max on your lumbar area (if you already have some pro-trusions, most people do after 35). 

During this time we lost our dad, and I needed a distraction and started building gitsaga.io as a toy but it got no where. Then, during the summer I had a clear problem from a gym owner friend, so I paired with a programmer from London and we started building this during the summer. This is the "flexible scheduling" category. We burned through 100 hours of work to later find out, it was too much niche - no other gym had this exact problem. It was bad product shaping on my part.

One month later I was asked to join a Founder in a reboot scheme and the split would be 50/50. It was guaranteed and in the sound music industry. I builded the first part (models and auth), did the UX and product discovery just to find out it was some sort of YC scheme not fitted for me. I decided this is not good investment for me.

I have launched a few products, failed a few.
So what it going on today and where do I see my future? 

I've spend many years working on large codebases, you'd think I'm 10x programmer, but knowledge doesn't grow linear with time. I think in the past 3-4 years have learned and done more then ever. And I'm just recently diving into SEO, learning GSC, improving DR for a website etc and I enjoy this and being part of this community gives me hope.

Thanks for reading so far (can't remember when I did this before, it did save me $100 on therapy fwiw).

Going forward, updates will be shorter and straight to the point.

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