In Thought #174 I told how I learned touch-typing in 11th grade in Olbernhau and how it helped me in the early 1990s on the university’s MS-DOS computers. Here the story continues – a story about the web, about expensive detours and about how, in the end, I came back to myself.
With Windows 95 the internet came into my life. At the time I was working as a freelance instructor in adult education and wanted to understand how websites work. My textbook was SELFHTML by Stefan Münz – for a whole generation in the German-speaking world, the way into the web. That’s where I looked things up, typed out tags, tried things, threw them away again.
With Matthias Hanns I built interactive PHP tests on english-online.de. Later came english-test.net. I met the programmer for it at BWM in Leipzig-Plagwitz: Vyacheslav Gromov, known as Slava, self-taught. Together we grew the site to five-figure visitor numbers a day.
Technically, to be honest, it was spaghetti code: raw PHP, everything hardcoded, content, logic and presentation all jumbled together – not a trace of separation of concerns. It worked. But every change was a risk.
So everything was to be rebuilt. Through Upwork, developer Joel Millen was to rebuild the site on Drupal for 10,000 dollars. The attempt failed – my verdict at the time, in two words: shoddy design. english-test.net only became stable with the Ukrainian agency Zfort Group, which rebuilt the project in PHP on the Yii framework. After that, I sold the site.
Then came english.best: this time in Python, on Google Cloud, with a Scrum team from Belarus. I spent between 30,000 and 50,000 euros on it. But what cost me the most energy wasn’t the money – it was the friction of remote communication: requirements travelling back and forth through tickets and meetings until little was left of the original idea.
After that I took a break for several years.
In autumn 2026 I’m sitting at a command line again – this time in the Linux terminal of my Chromebook, together with Gemini and Claude Code. And I type with the same ten fingers I trained in Olbernhau among the secretaries. That’s how uno.team is being built: no agency, no middleman, no friction between what I think and what ends up online.
For me, that is digital sovereignty: not being able to do everything alone, but holding the tools in such a way that my own thoughts set the direction. AI writes along – but I’m at the wheel.
Looking back today, the expensive detours weren’t for nothing. I now know what clean architecture is worth, what it costs when it’s missing, and how much freedom there is in understanding your own website yourself.
How the story continues – what came out of a single day in the terminal with Gemini and Claude Code, and why I no longer need website builders or agencies – I tell in the third part, Thought #430.
Three questions to keep thinking. Choose an answer – you will then get an explanation and a prompt for self-reflection.
What do you take away from this thought?
Thank you. Every answer fits – take it with you into your day. Would you like to share something yourself?
