From Aktau to Vienna

I grew up in Aktau, Kazakhstan - a desert city on the Caspian Sea that only exists because somebody put a nuclear reactor there. I recently built a game about it.

At 18 I moved to Saint Petersburg for engineering school. I knew nobody. The first couple of years were rough in the specific way that's hard to explain to people who've always had a network: not dramatic, just a long stretch of being slightly outside everything.

Two things carried me through, and neither was school.

Programming

I got hooked at 14. You write a few lines and the machine does something it couldn't do before. That was enough to hold my attention for entire evenings, which nothing else at that age managed.

Music

A year later I picked up a guitar. No lessons, no theory. I taught myself guitar, then singing, then a set of techniques I probably should have learned properly from someone who knew what they were doing. At some point I worked out how to do metal screaming on the inhale.

I was bad for a long time, and I was bad where people could hear it. That turned out to be the useful part - not the being bad, but the being bad publicly, which eventually disconnected experimenting from protecting my ego.

Starting from zero

No network, no momentum, a very large city, and a lot of unstructured time between classes.

I filled it with small software projects. None impressive, none portfolio-worthy, most of them abandoned. But the ones I finished, I finished, and over enough years that turns into a career without ever feeling like it's turning into one.

That's the part nobody tells you: it doesn't feel like progress while it's happening. It feels like making small things nobody asked for.

Now

Vienna. Married, two kids.

I still build things that ship and survive contact with real users, and I still apply the same loop outside work - I'm fairly data-driven about health, tracking what works and dropping what doesn't.

If you're in your own start-from-zero phase

New city, career switch, or just the feeling of being behind.

You don't need a plan. You need something you can repeat: pick one thing you actually care about, build something small, ship it, pay attention to what broke - in the thing and in you - and adjust.

That's genuinely all I did. It took much longer than it sounds, and I couldn't have told you at 19 that it was working.

If this lands, email me: me@eone.work