SIEBEBARÉE

The first thing I ever sold was a bookmark. I made them myself when I was nine and sold them to the other kids at school. Or that was the idea, because I ended up giving most of them away for free. You could say I learned philanthropy before I learned sales.

But I liked it. Making something and seeing people actually want it, that feeling never really went away.

I was a typical iPad kid, but when I turned twelve I got my first laptop. A very basic one that could run exactly one game: Minecraft. A year later just playing wasn't enough anymore, so I decided to host my own server.

That's how I learned about server hosting, configuring plugins and a bit of Java and Linux. I ran a couple of servers over the years and a lot of people played on them. I also lost a lot of money on them, because renting servers is not cheap when you're thirteen. It stayed a hobby, but it taught me more than school ever did.

When COVID hit I was sixteen and stuck at home, so I finally started learning how to code. I wanted my own Discord bot and Python seemed like the fastest way to get one.

I liked it so much that I was coding eighty hours a week during my exams. Luckily it was COVID, so half of them got cancelled anyway. That's when I really found my passion for coding.

Two years later I wanted to rebuild my bot in JavaScript, a language I didn't know yet. I learned it in a couple of days and seven days later Coinz was live. Fully working and already published. This was before AI existed, so I learned everything straight from the documentation.

Coinz was an economy that lived inside Discord. You could run a business, farm crops, trade stocks and crypto at real market prices or lose everything at the blackjack table. I built and ran all of it myself for three years: 1,269 commits, nine releases and a premium plan.

Coinz was never the only thing I was working on. Between thirteen and twenty-one I started more projects than I can honestly count. More Minecraft servers, some communities, hosting services, a social media app for the gym, a Discord bot agency, a ticketing system that connected support platforms before Intercom was everywhere and an offline key management tool for software licensing.

Almost none of them reached daylight. All of them together made me maybe a thousand euros. I didn't care about business models back then, I just loved building. But every project taught me something I used in the next one.

I went to college, but honestly I barely studied. I had been coding for so long that I graduated top of my class without much studying at all. All those side projects turned out to be the best preparation I could have asked for.

After graduating I became the only frontend engineer at EEVEE, an electric mobility company. A great first job, but I kept running into one problem that annoyed me more than it should have.