Yonko Ganev
Frontend developer, Sofia
I build the parts of a product people actually touch — the screens, the interactions, the moment where a complicated system has to feel simple. Most of my work is in TypeScript, React and Next.js, and most of it has ended up in front of real users.
How I got here
I first opened an HTML file when I was thirteen. I liked that I could type something and watch it appear, but I didn't go any further with it for a long time.
What actually started this was a website for a friend of my father's — a shop selling outdoor and garden goods. It was my first paid work, and it was the first time I saw the whole loop close: someone had a problem, I built something, and the thing I built was now their business online. That was the moment it stopped being a curiosity.
Before software I worked in sales and then in credit control. I was good at it and I didn't hate it, but I kept coming back to the idea that with a laptop and enough patience you can build a solution to almost anything. In 2021 I decided to stop thinking about it and commit.
I taught myself — online courses, documentation, guides, and a lot of building things badly before building them well. I don't have certificates from it. What I have is four years of shipped work, which I'd argue is the harder credential to fake.
The year it clicked
In early 2022 I joined a three-person team building the frontend for a decentralised finance protocol. I owned the frontend entirely.
It was well past what I was comfortable with. The interface had to reflect data coming from a blockchain, which meant state that changed underneath me constantly and events I had to listen for and reconcile in real time. Nothing about it worked like the tutorials. I spent two years on that codebase, and it rebuilt how I think about interfaces.
That's when I went full-time and started finding my own clients.
What I work with
- Every day
- Comfortable with
- Shipped with but still improving
- Currently learning
I've built and deployed working backends with FastAPI. I'm going deeper on Python deliberately.
- Deployment
I run my own infrastructure. When something breaks in production at 11pm, I'm the one who fixes it.
Selected work
Decentralised finance protocol
Frontend, team of three2022–2024This wasn't a build-and-leave project. We worked on it continuously for two years — adding features, reworking screens, fixing what real usage exposed.
That stretch taught me more than anything before or since: how to handle state I don't control, how to keep an interface honest when the data underneath it moves on its own, and what it takes to maintain something people depend on rather than just ship it once.
It grew past $60M in market capitalisation with more than 6,000 active users before winding down in 2024.
TradeIt
Trading competition platform2025I built the frontend and contributed to the backend. Users enter timed trading competitions — from hourly to weekly — and compete on final equity, with prize pools distributed across the top finishers.
The frontend work was dense: a live leaderboard updating as positions move, a trading panel with position management, take-profit and stop-loss handling, competition pages that generate their own descriptions from live data, and prize distribution logic in TypeScript that has to mirror the smart contract's logic exactly — if those two disagree, the interface lies to people about money.
I also built TradeScan, an explorer that makes every user, transaction, competition and result independently verifiable.
Boloromo
Internal accounting platform2025An auto parts business selling across Amazon, Temu and eMag, drowning in month-end reconciliation.
Every marketplace exports its sales in a different format. Delivery costs come from another provider entirely. Warehouse price lists sit in yet more files. Someone was pulling all of this into spreadsheets by hand to work out what the business had actually earned.
I built a dashboard that ingests all of it — marketplace sales reports, invoices and credit notes, delivery costs, warehouse pricing — matches products across sources by SKU, and produces a genuine profit figure with costs and taxes accounted for. Built in Bulgarian for the team using it.
- Launching mid-September
M-BRAND
Bulgarian clothing brand2026A rebuild of their storefront on Shopify, plus a custom Next.js platform that removes most of the manual work from listing a product.
Someone on their team uploads an ordinary photo of a garment. The platform sends it through an AI pipeline that places it in a clean white studio background, generates a product description, and then publishes it — to Shopify as a product, and to Instagram and Facebook as posts. The person uploading just sets name, price, colours and quantity.
Before this, listing a product meant hiring a photographer and posting everything by hand across four places. Now it's one upload.
- Launching in the next 40–50 days
Foldspace
Prediction platform2026Built with one other developer for a client. Users stake against each other on the outcome of games played by AI models. I built four game formats:
- Poker — Five AI models with different risk and bluff profiles play a tournament against each other. Users back a model before it starts; last one standing wins.
- Haggle — Two models negotiate over the price of a car, each with its own urgency, budget and target price. They exchange messages until they agree or don't. Users predict which side gets the better deal, or whether there'll be a deal at all.
- Rock paper scissors — Two models play, users call the outcome.
- Over/Under — A number between 1 and 100 is drawn, users call it against 50.5.
- Launched and handed over
Modey
AI community management SaaS2026Built for a client. A platform that automates social content for online communities — scheduling, generation, and publishing to X through OAuth.
A monorepo with background jobs handling the scheduling queue. I worked across the whole stack: the scheduling engine, rate limiting on the AI provider, the OAuth integration, a credit system driven by webhooks, and a full frontend refactor onto CSS Modules.
Currently building a landing page for a friend's interior design studio, and developing Forgi, my own website-creation service. This site is one of the things I've built with it.
What I'm looking for
A frontend role on a team that builds real products. Full-time, and I'm open to remote, Sofia-based, or relocating.
I don't have a strong preference about company size or industry. What I care about is working with people who are supportive and good at what they do — I've spent four years being the only developer on most of what I build, and I'd like to be somewhere I can learn from people who know more than me.
I'm 30, Bulgarian, and I chose this career deliberately rather than falling into it. That decision has held up.