I have built a lot of websites. I still build them, and honestly, I think I have become pretty good at it. I still enjoy making a page feel fast, clear, polished, and useful.
But websites by themselves are not really the thing I want to spend my whole future doing.
I already wrote about this from a slightly different angle in Pretty Is Not a Website Strategy. A good website should not just look nice. It should solve something.
That is the part I care about most now: finding repeated work and turning it into a shorter process.
Websites are still fun, but they are not the whole point
I do not dislike websites. The opposite, actually. A website is still one of the fastest ways to build something visible, useful, and easy for people to access. I like the details: speed, layout, content, design, structure, and the overall product feeling.
What I do not like is the idea of making the same landing page over and over, changing the logo, colors, and text, and pretending it is a brand-new problem every time.
When I build a website, the best part is when it becomes more than a presentation. When it gets an admin system, a map, a calculator, data processing, automation, or some internal tool behind it.
EasyFlex made that clear early
One of the best examples is EasyFlex. My mom runs her own accounting and tax advisory business, and every month she spends a lot of time entering invoice data into ABRA Flexi, the accounting system she uses.
On paper, this does not sound dramatic. You open an invoice, read the amount, date, supplier, variable symbol, a few other fields, and enter it into the system. But when you do that again and again, every month, for multiple clients, it becomes a lot of work. Not hard work, just repetitive, slow, and annoying.
The first version of EasyFlex was not some perfect platform. It was more of a test: what if I could take an invoice, extract the useful data, and prepare it in a way that makes the accounting work much faster?
Over time I rebuilt parts of it, fixed things, and improved the flow. The result is much more interesting to me than a nice portfolio screenshot: the time my mom spends on that part of the work dropped by more than ten times.
That is the type of building I like. Not because it looks impressive in a mockup, but because it removes work someone would otherwise repeat again and again.
The best features make something easier
I feel the same way with websites. When I worked on Mostky, the most interesting part was not just making a page with text and photos. It was the interactive 2.5D parcel map, because it helps people understand what is for sale, where it is, and how the plots relate to each other much faster.
That is the kind of extra feature I enjoy. Not animation just because something should move. I like features that help someone understand the situation faster or make a decision with less effort.
At that point, the website is mostly the surface. The interesting work is underneath: data, logic, a simple interface, automation, and information flowing in the right order.
Optimization is not only a technical thing
When I say I like optimizing, I do not only mean shrinking a bundle or making an API endpoint faster. I like that too, but it is only one layer.
I mean looking for friction in normal work. Where someone clicks ten times when they should click once. Where someone manually copies data that already exists somewhere else. Where a human waits on a step a system could handle. Where the same small mistake happens every month because nobody built a better process.
That is much more interesting to me than just asking whether a page looks nice. It should look nice. But if it does not make anything faster, easier, or clearer, then it is mostly decoration.
Right now I want experience
I do not know exactly what I want my final “real job” to be. And I think that is fine. I am still at the stage where I want to try as much as possible: websites, automation, AI tools, internal systems, databases, self-hosting, product work, all of it.
But the direction is becoming pretty clear. I like building things that are not just nice, but useful. Things that take boring, slow, repeated work and make it faster.
So yes, I will keep building websites. I just increasingly want there to be something real behind them.
That is the work I find most interesting now: find a problem, understand it well enough, and build a tool that makes it easier to deal with.