FAQ
Questions I get asked often - about education, coding, startups, and more.
University & Education
Do you need a degree to become a developer?
No. A degree is not a requirement. What matters is what you can actually build and how you think through problems.
Will university guarantee you a job?
Nobody knows. University is a tool in your toolbox - having a degree alone won't open many doors, but it will help in certain contexts. What you do with it matters more than having it.
What did university give you that self-learning couldn't?
Systematised information, reviewed by people who've spent years on it - often including conference speakers and researchers. A lot of people online comment on isolated parts of a topic, losing the full picture and inadvertently misleading others. University, at its best, gives you the full picture.
Would you do university again?
Personally, I'm not in love with the answer - but yes. A lot of the information I got there still serves me, and will continue to. It's not the experience I'd romanticise, but the knowledge was worth it.
How do you balance a PhD, work, and personal life?
I don't.
Coding & Learning
What language would you recommend for a complete beginner?
Python. It's readable, forgiving for beginners, and you can use it across most industries - data, web, automation, AI. It's also what most free learning resources teach well. Start there.
How do I know if programming is for me before investing months into learning?
Try block-based builders - there are plenty of games and visual tools that let you think in logic without writing code. If you enjoy figuring out how to get from A to B in a structured way, you'll likely enjoy programming. It's a low-effort way to test whether you have the logical thinking that makes coding feel natural.
When did you stop feeling like a beginner?
Never, and it won't happen. If it has stopped - you probably don't realise how much you still don't know.
How do you learn new things?
Everything - books, courses, documentation, videos. But mostly by building things. Reading about something and actually doing it are very different experiences.
Homelabs & Self-Hosting
What hardware do you run your homelab on?
Old small computers — repurposed mini PCs and similar low-power machines. Nothing fancy. The goal is to keep it cheap, quiet, and always on.
What do you actually run on it?
Quite a lot: video streaming (Jellyfin), music (Navidrome), local DNS (AdGuard Home), local LLMs (Ollama), file sharing (Samba), and a bunch of other self-hosted services — Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, Uptime Kuma, Home Assistant, and more. The list keeps growing.
Have you ever completely broken your homelab setup?
I don't break it by accident — I decide it needs to be done differently. There's a difference. Most rebuilds are intentional: I learn something, see a better way, and redo it.
Would you recommend a homelab to someone just starting out with Linux or networking?
Yes and no. The barrier is much lower than it used to be — a lot of things work out of the box now, and security defaults are decent even for beginners. But you still need patience and genuine curiosity. If you're doing it just to say you have one, you'll lose interest fast. If you actually want to understand how things work, it's one of the best learning environments there is.
Tech & Tools
What phone do you use?
Pixel. Sideloading will always matter to me, and Pixel gives me the most control over my device without fighting the manufacturer.
Mac, Linux, or Windows?
macOS — dreaming of the day it becomes Linux. Windows lost their users a long time ago and just hasn't fully registered it yet.
Is there widely-used technology you think is overrated?
Most Microsoft stuff.
Do you actually use AI tools in your work, or is it mostly hype?
I use them constantly and I'm always looking for ways to use them more. The hype is real, but so is the utility — if you're paying attention to what they're actually good at.
Side Projects
How do you decide which side projects to keep and which to abandon?
I don't really abandon them — I put them on pause and come back when the time is right, even if that's every two or three years. Most things I've built are still used by people. I regularly get emails from people thanking me or asking for help with something. If I can, I help. Right now I barely have time to help myself.
Do you have a mentor?
Still looking.
What are you reading right now?
Everything I need for my dissertation.
Entrepreneurship
Do you regret selling Bimbala.com?
I regret that we didn't get to realise it fully - with real traction, enough users to run the experiments we wanted, and the scientific implementations we had planned. Finishing my PhD now, I keep finding more and more approaches, features, and technologies that would have been a perfect fit for Bimbala. That part stings. But the decision to sell made sense at the time.
What would you do differently if starting over?
One feature at a time.
How do you know when to sell or shut down a project?
Gut feeling - but grounded in something real. With Bimbala, we could see that we weren't going to reach the outcome we wanted regardless of how much time we put in. The scope was simply too large for a two-person team. When effort stops moving the needle and you can see why it structurally won't, that's usually the signal.
Can you be both a great developer and a great entrepreneur?
Not really. Unfortunately, one will get in the way of the other - and at some point you'll have to choose which one you're optimising for.