Who am I?

Hello, my name is Ljupche. I'm a software engineer, youtuber and mentor. Currently located in Edinburgh, Scotland. Outside of work I like to run, go to the gym and attend the local tech events.

Origins

I am originally from Macedonia and started learning how to code at 12 years old. It's the only thing I knew I wanted to be. Eager to learn, I went down the path of video tutorials. I watched everything I could find on web development, mainly from lynda dot com.

Humble beginnings

I tried freelancing and had some success after a few years of trying and learning. But I always felt like I was behind. The biggest success I had with freelancing was when I started taking Upwork seriously and had a few monthly clients.

I've done a lot of different experiments to try and start a business of my own, none of which lasted long enough to see any success until I burned out and dropped everything.

Wordpress era

My web development journey started with Wordpress, customizing themes and plugins at first, then creating custom themes from PSD. And then working for a company with over 3000+ sites, creating a custom plugin and a theme for some of the biggest websites out there.

After a lot of years into using Wordpress, PHP, HTML, CSS and JQuery, I had a chance to work with Laravel and React.js which was a slight learning curve. I fell in love with the javascript ecosystem and after looking at the job market I decided to switch fully to Node.js and React.js.

JS/TS era

I switched jobs and have been working with Typescript, React.js, Node.js, AWS and a load of other technologies and third party services daily. I enjoy the JavaScript ecosystem and the way it's been progressing over the years.

Content

I also enjoy making youtube videos on programming and progressing in your career as a software engineer. Throughout the years I have done a lot of things wrong and my goal is to help people avoid the same mistakes I have done.

I have been attending the local technical meetups and events and recently guest hosted the EdinburghJS meetup which you can catch here.

Hobbies

Outside of work, I oscillate between gym and running to keep my mind sharp. I ran my first half-marathon in under 2h 30m last year and now taking a break from running.