To see the future, you must first understand the past. My journey began with the mechanical click of a ball mouse and the ritual of a floppy disk. I navigated the “Wild West” of the early internet, built a digital business from nothing, and felt the real-world impact of my work, as I described in the last chapter of my story. Each era, from Joomla to WordPress, from manual SEO to server engineering, was defined by its own set of tools and challenges. But through it all, one principle remained constant: the drive to understand the **entire system**, not just its individual parts.

Today, we stand on the cusp of the most profound technological shift yet: the age of Artificial Intelligence. And the ability to see the whole system, to connect the dots, is about to become the most valuable human skill in the digital economy.

A Personal Story: From One-Man Orchestra to Conductor

When I was running my water filter business alone, I was a “one-man orchestra.” I played every instrument myself: the “violin” of SEO, the “drums” of server administration, the “piano” of customer communication. It was exhausting, but it taught me to understand how each instrument sounds and how they must work together to create a melody.

Today, AI is emerging as the perfect musician. It can play any instrument with flawless, virtuosic skill, a thousand times faster than any human. It can be the perfect violinist, the perfect pianist, the perfect drummer. But there is one thing it cannot do.

“It cannot be the **conductor**. It cannot read the score, hear the future symphony in its mind, understand the composer’s (the client’s) intent, and with a wave of a baton, make dozens of virtuosos play as one, imbuing the music with soul and purpose. My role has evolved. From a one-man orchestra, I am becoming a conductor.”

Posted on [Date] by [Your Name] in My Journey, Business Philosophy

The previous chapters of my story, like the one about how installing water filters taught me about business, were about a steady, focused evolution. The years passed. My water purification business, led by my partner, was thriving. I, in turn, had fully immersed myself in web architecture, finding immense satisfaction in engineering complex, efficient systems. I was the “one-man orchestra” who had finally found his harmony. Life was stable, predictable, and prosperous. I wasn’t a millionaire, but I had something more valuable: peace of mind, built on systems that worked flawlessly. I thought it would always be this way.

And then, in a single day, that entire world collapsed. On February 24, 2022, war came to my country.

A Personal Story: Through the Thorns

After nearly two years of uncertainty and living under constant stress, I made the most difficult decision of my life: to leave. This was not a business-class flight to a new opportunity. It was a journey into the unknown. I was literally making my way through shadows and thorns, leaving behind everything I had spent decades building.

When I finally arrived in a safe place in Europe, I had almost nothing but a laptop and the experience I carried with me. It was my most precious asset. I looked back at my life—the highs and lows of the SEO “gold rush,” the joy of a customer’s gratitude for clean water, the sleepless nights spent fixing hacked servers—and I understood something profound.

“All those years, without even realizing it, I wasn’t just building websites. I was building a system of survival. A system that was reliable, efficient, and predictable even in the heart of chaos. That system—my proprietary stack from server configuration to final SEO—is the precious plant I carried out of a forest of thorns.”

If not for the war, this website, this offer for international clients, would likely never have seen the light of day. I would have continued to work comfortably in my local market. But these harrowing events forced me to rethink everything. They forged a new purpose.

The era of the “link empire,” which I described in Part 5, was coming to an end. The money was there, but the sense of purpose was gone. I was creating dozens of websites that were merely advertising billboards, not solutions to real problems. I returned to my hometown of Kharkiv and started launching projects out of inertia—a city business directory, an online store for car tuning parts. Nothing sparked a fire until a chance conversation changed everything.

An acquaintance mentioned that their family’s water purification company was looking for someone to build and manage a website. The words “water purification” resonated deeply. This wasn’t about links or ad revenue. This was about something real, something tangible, something useful.

A Personal Story: The Leaky Faucet and the Moment of Truth

One day, an urgent call came in from an elderly couple. Their old water filter was leaking, and all the available technicians were busy. Without much thought, I grabbed a toolbox and drove over myself. I spent two hours in their small kitchen, on my knees, replacing worn-out gaskets and tubes.

When I finished, and a stream of clean, fresh water flowed from the tap, something unexpected happened. The homeowner, a woman in her seventies, hugged me with tears in her eyes. “Son, thank you so much!” she said. “You’re a lifesaver.”

“In that moment, I didn’t receive money. I received something far more valuable: direct, heartfelt human gratitude for solving a real, tangible problem. It broke all my previous frameworks about business and sales. That was the end of the ‘programmer’ era and the birth of the ‘solution architect’.”

I realized that all my SEO skills, all my code, all my designs—all of it is meaningless unless, at the very end of the chain, there is a happy person whose problem has been solved. This revelation became the new core of my professional philosophy.

Three Key Lessons from a Plumber’s Toolbox

That decade of “field work” taught me more about web development than any book or course ever could. Here are the core lessons:

1. A website must solve a real-world problem.

Customers aren’t searching for “reverse osmosis systems with a mineralizer.” They are searching for “how to get safe, clean drinking water for my family.” Your website must speak the language of problems and solutions, not the language of technical specifications.

2. The user experience extends offline.

A perfect website is useless if no one answers the phone after an order is placed. The entire digital experience, from the first click on an ad to the follow-up service call, must be seamless. The website is just one touchpoint in that journey.

3. Gratitude is the ultimate conversion metric.

A happy customer who has had their problem genuinely solved will not just pay you. They will return, and they will tell their friends. This is more powerful than any advertising campaign. A website that facilitates this level of service is a website that truly succeeds.

The year is 2007. I’m in Kyiv with enough money for exactly one month’s rent. My assets consist of a few small embroidery orders and an unwavering belief that the internet is the future. I opened a job search website and placed my bet on two emerging fields: “designer” and the mysterious but alluring “SEO specialist.” A few days later, the phone rang. It was an invitation for an interview for a full-time SEO position. I had no idea what to expect, but I felt this was my chance.

The Fork in the Road: A Partnership and a New CMS

In parallel with my day job, I met someone who would change my entire trajectory. We didn’t meet in a fancy cafe; we met on the street. He didn’t offer me a salary; he offered a partnership. “Let’s build websites together,” he said. He was the one who gave me the initial advice for my SEO interview, which helped me land that job.

He opened a new door for me. Until then, my experience was with basic HTML and the painfully rigid OS Commerce engine at my job, where I’d wait weeks for the programmer to make a single change. My new partner introduced me to something different. I typed `/administrator` after a domain name, entered a login and password, and a control panel opened up that was a world apart from anything I’d seen before.

It was Joomla 1.0. It was intuitive, flexible, and powerful. With my partner’s guidance, I learned its logic within a week. The days of begging a developer to add a meta tag field were over. I could now build, manage, and optimize an entire site myself.

The Growing Pains: When the Gold Rush Turns to a Grind

But “easy” money comes with its own set of problems. Our small empire began to show cracks.

The Server Overload

Our hosting provider started sending “love letters.” Our 25+ sites, all running on a single shared hosting account, were generating so much database load that they were slowing down other websites on the same server. We were constantly being pushed to upgrade to more expensive plans, eating into our profits.

The Inevitable Hack

Then, the inevitable happened. We were hacked. Not just one site—the entire server was compromised. All 25 sites were infected. Our income from link sales plummeted overnight. What followed was a baptism by fire: weeks of cleaning malicious code, hunting for vulnerabilities, and painstakingly restoring sites from the ashes, all while trying not to lose our precious search engine rankings. It was an incredible stress test that taught me more about website security than any course could.

The Writing on the Wall

At the same time, the news from the search engines was getting ominous. The “link bubble,” we realized, was about to burst. In our conversations, two new acronyms emerged: “GS” (a Russian acronym for “Sh*t Site,” made for selling links) and “SDCH” (“Site aDapted for CHristian-people,” meaning “a site made for humans”). We understood that the future was in quality, unique content, not in automated link farms.

My life as a young man had been a series of disconnected passions: the logic of systems, the freedom of the early internet, the creative outlet of poetry and HTML, described in Part 3. I was back at university, closing academic gaps, when a chance encounter opened a door I never knew existed. A friend mentioned an opening at his family’s sewing factory for a “Computer Embroidery Programmer.” The word “Programmer” was a magnet I couldn’t resist. The next day, I was at the job interview, ready for a new challenge.

From Digital Code to Factory Hustle

My job wasn’t confined to a computer screen. I was the guy driving across the city to deliver goods and transport patterns. My work often took me to the main sewing workshop next door. Being a young guy surrounded by the hum of machinery and a workshop full of young seamstresses was a welcome change of pace from staring at a monitor. More importantly, seeing the entire production line hammered home a crucial lesson: a perfect digital design is useless if the physical system can’t execute it flawlessly.

From Small Jobs to a Major Score

I was hungry for more. I started plastering links to my site on forums and classifieds boards. That hustle landed me a massive order: three truckloads of towels for a major hair care brand. They chose me for one reason: the perfect quality I could guarantee. My obsession with a flawless final product had paid off, big time.

That success solidified a plan in my mind, sharp and clear: move to Kyiv, build a professional website to attract clients from the capital, outsource the production to the factories in Kharkiv, and profit from the simple arbitrage. It was a perfect business model.

By my 5th year of university, the plan was in motion. But to make it in the capital, I needed cash for rent and expenses. My first move in Kyiv had to be a practical one: get another job as an embroidery programmer to fund my real ambition.

The real world, as it always does, had pulled me back. The borderless, text-based universe of mIRC, described in Part 2, faded behind the realities of high school, basketball, and street rivalries. The 11th grade came and went. The final school bell rang, followed by the requisite parties and celebrations. My grades were the last thing on my mind; I already knew they were a formality, a bureaucratic stamp on a chapter that was already closed. I returned home, anticipating a summer of freedom, and found a gift waiting for me. A real PC. A Celeron 900 with Windows 98. My joy was limitless.

A New Identity in a Familiar World

Networks, Real and Digital

The Power of Cramming

To be continued in Part 4…

Posted on [Date] by [Your Name] in My Journey

In Part 1, my journey ended at a doorway. I had explored the self-contained universe of a single machine running Windows 95 and was the first to sign up for a course on a single, electrifying word: The Internet. I was about to trade the logic of a system for the logic of a network. I had no idea it would feel less like a classroom and more like falling down a rabbit hole.

The Language of the Network

The teacher began to unravel the magic. He spoke of protocols, of browsers, and gave a brief but brilliant overview of HTML. He was translating the internet’s essence into a language we could understand. We went through a list of programs, but one, in particular, stuck with me: the email client, The Bat!. Its efficiency and logic were so compelling that I would use it for many years to come.

But amidst all these tools for sending and receiving information, there was one program that seized my imagination from the moment I understood its purpose. It wasn’t about sending a message and waiting for a reply. It was about connection, here and now.

It was called **mIRC**.

The Summer of mIRC

The next day, I went back. I just walked in, sat down at a vacant computer in the back, and started listening to the new group’s lecture. The teacher noticed me. “You’re here again?” he asked, not unkindly. I explained that I was fascinated and wanted to dive deeper. Luckily for me, there were a couple of empty seats.

“Just be quiet and don’t disturb the class,” he said. I had no intention of disturbing anyone. I opened mIRC, and the entire world—the classroom, the teacher’s voice, the city outside—all of it dissolved. My universe shrank to the dimensions of the monitor. For three hours, I was completely gone, lost in a sea of text channels and private messages, until the sight of a neighboring student shutting down their PC pulled me back to reality.

I stepped outside into the warm evening air. And everything was different. It was as if the world had switched from a standard film to IMAX—a technology that didn’t even exist for me then. The colors were sharper, the sounds were clearer, the sense of space was profound. My brain, rewired by three hours of intense digital focus, was perceiving reality with a new, heightened clarity.

The next day, I went back again. And the day after that. Within a week, I was a regular, an unofficial fixture in the computer lab. No one seemed to mind. I spent that entire summer in mIRC. I wasn’t limited to Ukraine; the borders online felt porous, almost imaginary. I chatted in channels for cities all across the CIS, exploring communities, learning the slang, studying the program’s scripting capabilities. I even lurked in English-speaking channels, trying to decipher the conversation with my limited “hi, bye” vocabulary.