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Hello, I'm Martin.
I've connected with a few new people recently, so here's a little reintroduction.
I don't like labels, so let me tell you what I'm doing instead…
🌎 I live in different places
I don't have a fixed home, which means I can be anywhere.
For the past couple of years, that's been Southeast Asia.
I've mostly lived in Bangkok 🇹🇭 and Da Nang 🇻🇳 plus some other places in between.
It's hard to capture how transformative it is to sell everything you own and move to the other side of the world.
New experiences, communities, friends, food, languages, values and ways of living.
10/10 recommend.
👨🏻💻 I build software that aligns with my passions
In the past couple of years I launched 4 apps, all within the language learning space.
I'm currently building a new app called LangBot, which helps people practise languages on X.
I always want to do my best work. I care about details, experience, great engineering and building great things. I'm a perfectionist and I suffer all the consequences.
I'm very unmotivated by money, and have been both when I earned over $20k/month and when I was broke.
I believe the only valuable assets we have are our time, health and attention.
🗣️ Human language deeply interests me
Over the years I've tried to learn lots of languages.
🇩🇪 Mein Deutsch ist immer noch schlecht...
🇪🇸 Pero creo que mi español es un poco mejor...
🇻🇳 Và tôi cũng biết nói một chút tiếng Việt
🇹🇭 ตอนนี้ผมเข้าใจภาษาไทยนิดหน่อยแล้ว
But my favourite language is Esperanto.
It's an invented language, which I speak fluently, and oddly, have more friends than in English.
👦🏻 I got into coding as a kid
I spent my early days being welcomed onto the internet by a chorus of strange noises.
Modems, people.
I have a lot of great memories of learning to code from being around 11 or 12.
I've written about some of my early coding stories, as they were both sort of crazy and very transformative. They're all on my blog.
🤏 I love small teams
I've worked at startups and huge companies, doing everything from engineering and education to leadership.
Over that time I've collected some axioms for engineering – things I think are generally true, and guide my future work. Also on my blog.
Now I work solo.
I quit working for other people when I moved to Asia, and after 2 years at it, only just reached "ramen profitability". There's a lot more work to do!
Working lonely can be lonely, for sure. But it's amazing to be spending all of my time creating my own value in the world. And I started Build Mode so I could take the best people with me wherever I go.
And that's me.
You should totally introduce yourself.
English
