I don't ask for a brief, because I was once the person who couldn't write one.

I was a business developer before I was an architect. I sold Ukrainian software developers to western companies, and my job was to start the conversations. I tried every classical business development approach there is and found that none of them worked, so I built the thing that did. That is why I do not ask a client for a specification. I have been the person on the other side of that request, the one who holds the problem and cannot write it down. The twenty years either side of it come to the same work: putting a stable interface in front of chaotic reality. Payment providers in 2010, job boards in 2021, LLM vendors in 2025. Different decade, same job.

I left Ukraine in 2022. The tidy answer for why Norway is the climate, the nature and the considerate people, and all of that is true. The real answer is that I was building automation for job applications, aiming at Germany or Austria because I speak German, and my script had a bug. It applied to a Norwegian company by mistake. They invited me to an interview, and that is how I ended up here. I rode over on my motorcycle, a week from Ukraine through Poland, Germany and Denmark, and the last few hours through Norway were the most beautiful of the whole trip. I have been in Fredrikstad since, and I am not open to relocation.