About
It’s an honour for me that you have decided to read this “About” page, among a gazillion other things you can browse on the Internet right now.
My name is Stanislav Bozhkov (I can be found online as Stan Bright). I’m a Bulgarian who lives in Sydney, Australia. I consider myself lucky, as I can say Bulgaria is a really great place to grow up and grow as a person, and Sydney (and Australia in general) is one of the best placed to live and enjoy life.
I’m a software engineer and entrepreneur. I tweet as @StanBright, and you can find me on LinkedIn, too. I’m passionate about software development, automation, productivity, business, philosophy, good books, a healthy and active lifestyle and building products that improve people’s lives. I consider myself a polymath… yet I’m aware that I’m a lifetime away of becoming one.
The best way to contact me is by sending an email to stan@stanbright.com or on Twitter.
I have a now page, too.
The information below is in reverse chronological order.
Starting (up) again (2019 - now)
After moving to Australia in 2017, I started work at a local payment processor and a growing and bootstrapped start-up - Fat Zebra. I spent two years there working as a senior software engineer (Ruby on Rails). I had a great time. At some point, though, I started having the aspirations of working on my own ideas. Again. Full-time. So, around the middle of 2019 I quit FZ and started working full-time on my side-projects SaaSHub & LibHunt.
Moving to Sydney, Australia (2017)
Around 2014 I got the idea of making a big change. I did some research on where could be the best place to live (for me). Long story short - I moved to Australia with my girlfriend/partner in Jan 2017. Neither of us had put feet in Oz before that, but both of us were excited.
Having lived here for a while now I am assured that Sydney, Australia is the best place to live, offering a great work-life balance, plenty of job and entertainment opportunities, great people, amazing climate and basically almost everything one could need to enjoy life. The only downside is its being too far from the rest of the world (which is an upside as well in some cases).
Receipt Bank and side-projects (2010 - 2016)
After my grown-up startup, I wanted to start something by myself. So, I tried freelancing and working on some side projects. Just a few months after leaving svejo.net, I got contacted by Receipt Bank (it was named ‘Receipt Farm’ at that point). A UK based company had bought a simple SaaS software based on Ruby on Rails and had great ideas on how to develop it. However, they had a small team of Java developers based in Sofia, Bulgaria. I was introduced as an external consultant to help the team with my Ruby on Rails experience. I hadn’t planned for that, but my relationship with Receipt Bank lasted 5 years! I simply loved working with both the founders in London and the team in Bulgaria. Again, I had an amazing experience and learned and contributed a lot. Two of my more significant projects there were building their billing system and the extraction engine (ML) that extracts all key attributes of a random receipt or invoice.
In the meantime, while working for Receipt Bank, I started two side projects on my own, which I’m still maintaining and developing as of 2020 - LibHunt & SaaSHub.
First entrepreneurship endeavours (2007 - 2009)
Living in a tiny 10 m2 room in an old students’ dormitory in Sofia, a friend of mine and I built the biggest link-sharing social network in Bulgaria at that time - svejo.net (translated fresh.net). It was, more or less, a Digg.com clone with some differences and focused on the local blogging community. Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist at that point. Developing that project from the ground up was the best experience I could get as a 20-something boy. At its peak, the project had about 3M monthly visits (that was big for a country of 7M).
Some random early-age facts (< 2007)
I’ve been dealing with computers since 14 years old (my parents had to take a loan to buy me a computer). While I am largely a self-learner, I studied in a high school which built to support the micro-processors factory next door. So, I learned the basics of both programming and how hardware works (CPUs, memory, mainboards, etc.) relatively early in my life.
When I was 16, I used to be the president of a students company (called “Future Star”) through one of Junior Achievement’s programs. We were baking and selling peanut butter cookies and organizing parties.
Smile
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