My name is Sławomir. By day, I do general building work in West London — managing schedules, suppliers, and the kind of problems that only happen at 7am when half the crew doesn't show up and the client is already on site. By night, I build software.
I'm not a software engineer. I have no computer science degree. I didn't learn to code from YouTube tutorials or bootcamps. Four years ago I had an idea for a classifieds platform and zero programming knowledge — and I thought I could just buy my way through it.
The Freelancer Trap
I started the way most non-technical founders do: I bought a ready-made script and hired freelancers to customise it. I paid good money. I got half-working solutions. Bots attacked the server. Databases degraded. Cloudflare didn't catch everything. One "expert" after another came and went — none of them understood what I actually needed, or cared enough to fix it properly.
"After a year of fighting windmills I realised: either I cut costs to the minimum, or this project will never launch."
That was the turning point. Not a dramatic hack or a midnight outage — just a slow, grinding realisation that if I couldn't understand what was happening on my own server, I'd always be at someone else's mercy.
Starting From Scratch — the Hard Way
I rebuilt everything from scratch. With AI help I found free alternatives to cPanel, cheaper servers, and free tools I hadn't known existed. I learned PowerShell, SSH, and Webmin — not from courses, but by necessity. I pasted error messages and code snippets into chat windows and tested the results on a live server, because I couldn't even set up a local development environment. Instead of Git, I made server snapshots before touching anything.
It was slow. It was messy. But every mistake taught me something that no tutorial would have.
Then I Found Claude
I'd been using AI to help me search and troubleshoot, but when I discovered Windsurf — and then Claude — everything changed. I wasn't just fixing problems anymore. I was building for real.
I made thousands of mistakes. AI fixed one thing and broke another. I tested Nginx, Apache, LiteSpeed, Varnish, and H2O before I settled on Caddy and built a stable foundation on top of it. Each wrong turn cost time, but the knowledge stuck in a way that reading documentation never does.
My approach: I don't write code from scratch as a programmer would. I imagine what I need, describe it precisely, verify the result, and let AI handle the syntax. I make the decisions. AI executes. The product is real either way.
Building the Answer: Sentinel
Before I could add any AI features to my classifieds platform, I had to fix the bots and lock down the security. The server was getting hammered — automated login attempts, port scans, SQL injection probes. They start within minutes of your IP becoming reachable.
I started writing scripts to monitor what I cared about: which IPs were scanning, what the database slow query log was saying, who was hitting the login endpoint. One script became ten. Ten became a dashboard. That dashboard became Sentinel.
At the time of writing: 277,000+ blocked attack events across the fleet. Each one a real probe, a real scan, a real credential attempt that hit a wall.
What Came After
Once the foundation was solid, I went further. I completely abandoned Laravel and PHP. I rewrote my classifieds platform — 24ad.info — from scratch on a modern stack: React 19, TypeScript, tRPC, Node.js. I rewrote breathtime.info in just six hours. Everything is faster, cleaner, and actually maintainable.
Sentinel became FixFlex LTD — a registered UK company building software products from West London. The portfolio now includes a classifieds platform with AI features, a spam filter, a social media tool, and an AI website generator for small businesses. All of it self-funded. All of it built before and after a full day on site.
I still wake up at 6am for the building work. I still code at night.
"I don't know programming languages at an expert level. I don't need to. I imagine, describe, verify — AI codes. I decide."
If you're thinking about building something but feel blocked by the technical side — you don't need a degree. You need a clear idea, the patience to keep going when things break, and the right tools. The rest you learn by doing.