Aleš Gaber

I started building websites in 2005 and moved into e-commerce early, back when that meant writing a lot of it yourself. Two decades later I still do the parts most people outsource or avoid: PrestaShop internals, WooCommerce and WordPress under the hood, custom checkout logic, integrations that have to actually be reliable, migrations that can’t lose anything, and cleaning up sites after someone’s broken into them.

The work I’m proudest of isn’t flashy. It’s a custom CRM and CMS I wrote in 2009 that’s still running a business today. Scheduling systems where the rules were the hard part. Integrations that quietly keep three systems in step so nobody ever has to think about them. Boring, in the way good engineering is boring.

I’ve stayed a one-person operation deliberately. It means whoever hires me gets the senior developer they actually hired — every time, on every line — instead of a name on a proposal and a junior doing the build. When something is genuinely bigger than one person, I bring in people I’ve worked with for years; you’re told exactly who and when, and you still deal only with me.

These days I do that work white-label, behind agencies’ brands. The brief I want is the one that’s actually hard: the inherited PrestaShop install nobody wants to touch, the integration that keeps failing, the migration that has to come out the other side with everything intact. That’s the work I’m good at, and it’s the work I like.

Away from the screen I build things with my hands — RC planes, electronics, whatever’s half-finished on the bench. Same instinct as the day job: take it apart, find out why it’s not working, put it back together properly. I’ve never been able to leave a broken thing alone, which turns out to be a useful way to be when someone hands you one.