The Unlikely Journey from Bricks to Bytes
I'm a builder. I taught myself to run servers because freelancers kept burning my money. West London, 2021. I was standing on a site holding a cup of tea that had gone cold an hour earlier, watching a crew argue about where a wall should go. That's my actual job. Schedules, suppliers, the kind of problems that only exist at 7am when half the crew hasn't shown up and the client is already phoning. But my head was somewhere else. I'd been chewing on an idea for a classifieds platform for months. Not a grand vision, nothing with a business plan and projections. Just a gap I could see — a way to connect buyers and sellers that felt easier and more global than what was out there. The problem was that I knew nothing about programming. And I mean nothing. I didn't know what a database was. I'd never written a line of code. My entire technical CV was "reasonably good at not breaking my own phone." So I did what most people in my position do. I tried to buy my way in. The expensive year I found a ready-made classifieds script online. Looked professional, had features, didn't cost the earth. The smart shortcut, I told myself. Then I hired a freelancer to customise it. Then another one, when the first disappeared mid-project. Then another, when the second delivered something that worked on a good day and fell over on a bad one. Here's the thing nobody warns you about hiring freelancers when you can't read code: you can't judge the work. You can't tell the difference between someone who wrote something clean and someone who duct-taped it together to last until the invoice clears. Both show you the same thing — a screen where the button does what the button's meant to do. So you pay, you say thanks, you move on. And three months later the button stops working and the freelancer's gone. Meanwhile the bots had found me. Within weeks of going live, automated scripts were hammering the contact form, then the registration page, then the login. "It's normal," a freelancer told me. "Ha