Ciao! Hi! Здравей! Salut! I’m Svetoslav, a full-stack developer from 🇧🇬 Bulgaria.

I’ve been building for the web for nearly twenty years. Back in the mid-90s my dad introduced me to computers. When he wasn’t working, I had the joy of playing Prince of Persia, Aladdin, Wolfenstein, Doom, Super Mario, and other (not-so-legendary) games from 3½-inch floppy disks. I’m old enough to remember the sound of dial-up internet, the dancing paperclip, and the turbo button.

The first code I recall seeing was a hack for Counter-Strike 1.5 written in Delphi. Soon after, with IRC being the main way to connect with friends, I became interested in mIRC scripting (back then, people used it for a hilarious variety of things—from Winamp copycats to HTTP servers). My father also ran a few small websites built with Microsoft FrontPage and hosted on GeoCities. I remember switching between Design and Code view, deleting bits of HTML just to see what would happen. That’s when the seed of my love for the web was planted.

My journey through the magical world of table layouts, scrolling marquees, and colorful scrollbars had just begun. After school, I spent most of my free time pleasing Internet Explorer 7 and cracking open all kinds of electronics (many cassette players, radios, and amplifiers never survived my reassembly skills). One day I overheard a conversation about PHP on #mircscripting and decided to download a WAMP stack. Since then my tools of trade have stayed familiar—HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL—with the exceptions of dropping Flash (never my strength) and adding JavaScript, which I once thought useful only for popups and window.history.go(-1), until I discovered jQuery around 2008.

I graduated from the French Language High School in Burgas and earned a master’s degree in IT Project Management from New Bulgarian University in Sofia. Today I run PixelSea, my software-focused company. In my free time I work on personal projects and experiment with Home Assistant. I DJ as a hobby, and once in a while there’s a chance to catch me behind the decks in local clubs. I’m also a fan of vintage audio equipment and often play my music through rare 80s speakers (Technics SB-RX50 and SB-6000). I spent some time living in Milan, and I’ve kept a soft spot for Italian food, design, and way of life.

So now you know my story. Thanks for stopping by!