From intern in Tirana to running two products
Five years, four employers and two of my own platforms. The short version of how I got from a PHP internship to shipping AI systems, and what I would tell someone starting now.
I started as an intern in 2020 at Turgut Ozal Education, then junior work at Albania Software House, then backend at Vzani in Tirana, then a remote year at Scandiweb in Riga on large e-commerce, then back to Vzani as a software developer. Nothing about that path was planned.
Agency work taught me scale
At Scandiweb I saw what happens to code when a site has real traffic and a real revenue number attached. You stop writing clever things. You write the boring, observable, recoverable version — because someone will be debugging it at midnight, and it might be you.
My own products taught me everything else
Direct Dine and Albania Magic forced me into decisions developers usually get handed: pricing, onboarding, which feature to cut, what to tell a restaurant owner whose printer stopped during dinner service. It is uncomfortable, and it made me a much better engineer.
Why I still do client work
Products are slow. Client work keeps me sharp across stacks and pays for the runway. It also means what I learn in one place helps the other: the tenancy model from Albania Magic became the CRM patterns I reuse now.
What I would tell someone starting
Ship something that has a user who is not you. One real deployment teaches you more than ten tutorials, and it is the only thing that makes a portfolio worth reading.
I take on a small number of projects at a time. Tell me what you are building and I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person for it.
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