About me.
Well, my name is Kuanysh.
I’m primarily into applying technology in a minimal and careful way to improve one’s lifestyle.
I believe lifestyle comes first.
I believe lazy people work the hardest.
I believe truth no matter how ugly is fundamental to our well-being.
My stepfather brought a Pentium II when I was three. That was around 96-97 in Eastern Kazakhstan, a city called Semipalatinsk.
Looking back I realize that computers were a form of escapism for me. Clanking on the keyboard, playing games is how I spent most of my childhood.
My first Internet impression was of my aunt ICQ'ing with someone. That was back in '99. I was 7.
I got my first money for selling CDs with pirated content when I was 10 or so. A bit later I was selling mods and cheatsheets for GTA and other games of that era to my classmates. After that I was jailbreaking PSPs.
Around 10-11 I got interested in animation. There was a Russian animation show called Masyanya which was made with Macromedia Flash. One summer when I was in a 3rd grade my mom’s sister invited me to Moscow for a few weeks (I had gone to Moscow earlier with my grandma — that was one of the core moments for me, I’ll explain later). Anyway, I got into Macromedia Flash. I learned about frames, vector animation, layers, and ActionScript.
That same trip my cousin and her boyfriend brought me to the biggest marketplace with books, CDs, etc. called Gorbushka.
I got random book about Macromedia Flash and started going through it. A lot of it went over my head but I got a taste of it.
One of the visitors to my aunt’s saloon was a programmer, so I asked my aunt to ask him to show me some tricks.
The dude ran a for in loop in bash and created dozens of folders and then swiftly removed them. I was impressed.
Another thing he showed me is creating an index.html with marquee tag in it. I was like, okay. Now we’re talking.
After that I spent the rest of my trip learning about HTML, CSS and Flash animation creating menus, and other GUI elements.
It was great because they had relative fast DLS connection.
After I got back, I continued to work on the webdev.
The first person I created a website for was a guy from a parallel class. He paid me an equivalent of $22 to make a website about Counter Strike for him. It took me 4-5 days. I was ~14 and he was my first client really.
I was fucking around a lot as a teenager. Girls, booze, etc. I wasn’t developed right. I had raw cognitive ability but the gateway and vehicle to use it weren’t there.
I badly wanted to leave but I wasn’t the acamedics type. Around that time my cousin studied in Aberdeen, Scotland for her Master’s. I joined her for 6 months to study English. It was manageable but I was eating mostly cheap white bread and cheese. I lost 25-30 kg during those 6 months (I got healthy really as I was overweight as a teen).
When I was 18 I went to Malaysia to go to a basic college as it was super affordable. I quickly realized it was a dumb idea and after 12 months of getting courages I finally left the studies and returned back home. After dusting off my skills as a web dev, I found a job as a front-end developer. It took me 2-3 months. My first salary was $250 per month or $3k per year. My foot was in the door.
The next year at this job I built a lot of cool stuff that was used by tens of millions of people. I was the only front-end developer amongst dozens of “real” developers who wrote Java. I was the youngest guy at 19 so everyone kind of let me be.
That year I was working, coming back home, eating, and then watching tutorials and grinding until late night. I consumed everything I could get my eyes on, Abduzeedo, Codrops, TutsPlus, Codecademy, etc.
Over the course of 1.5 years I turned into a decent developer who could design, write HTML, CSS, JavaScript.
After a year of work at that company I got a bonus, which was around $2000. I took that money and went on a trip to Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Bali. It was great, I was proud of myself. I was 20.
After going back to Kazakhstan, which is cold and unwelcoming unlike South-East Asia I knew I had to go back one way or the other. Staying local would be stupid.
Around that time I learned about digital nomads, it was circa late 2014. I started to see that there are a lot of people who do that lifestyle, work remote, travel, and enjoy life.
In spring of 2015, I quit that job knowing it was enough. Now it’s time being self-employed. Currency was being devalued, so I knew I had to get paid in USD or it’ll be really, really bad.
That summer my cohort was graduating, and I had two years of experience and knew English well enough to service international clients.
To my surprise the adjacent company reached out to me about doing contract work for them. I set the hourly rate to $20 per hour and got paid in a week more than I had been paid for in a month. I was making progress.
Throughout the next few months I raised my rate to $40/h and made an iPhone worth of money in 2 days. People working there were kind of pissed and I had gotten funny comments from them I still remember to this day.
That contract lasted for a few months and it was it.
I had $4000 saved, and it was July 2015. I learned about Chiang Mai from communities online and went there with a goal of finding an international client who would be paying me more than $40/h and giving this lifestyle a go.
After 3 months of traveling in Thailand and neighbouring countries, I had nothing to show for it and my money was gone. I had a credit card with a $2k limit I (smartly) prepared ahead. Just a few weeks later that money was gone too (flight back home is half of it, really).
Coming back $2k in debt was a stressful situation. I didn’t tell anyone.
Sitting in my bedroom, and looking for an answer, approach, method… something that could work I found themagicemail.com. I had a few leads from Reddit and other online places but they went cold. So I used that method and followed up saying:
“Since I have not heard from you on this, I have to assume your priorities have changed.”
A couple of days later one responded: let’s get started. I said “provide a $500 deposit”. I got it in a few minutes on PayPal. The hourly rate was $75/h. I was ecstatic. Now was my time to win. Remember my salary in Kazakhstan after all increases, currency devaluation, etc. was only ~$500 per month. So I could be making the equivalent of my month’s worth of work in a single work day.
For the projects I worked on with that studio/company I delivered Meteor.js-based apps and cumulatively got paid $50k throughout 5 months.
This was the most pivotal period of my adult life. I escaped local barriers.
To be continued…
TL;DR:
I made my first website at 11 with Flash. Then I taught myself to code which led me to full-stack apps, freelance, then product + copywriting, and eventually biz dev. I went remote in 2014. I’m a father, husband, and a Kazakh living in Cascadia.
— Kuanysh