Introductions: who, what, where

[mateo]

Who are you? What’s your background?

I’m Mateo - Primo’s founder & biggest fan (I’d have to be to work on it for this long for free). I’ve been a developer for close to 11 years; I started by taking an hourly job at a construction company where I stressfully tried to piece together a brochure site in Joomla. After I figured it out, I graduated to stressfully piecing together brochure sites in WordPress for other local businesses while attending community college and learning HTML & CSS on the side (which did me no good in WordPress).

After a year I transferred to Virginia Tech to study economics and worked part-time at various startups, finally putting my coding skills to good use and learning enough to get an internship at a local leading agency called NewCity, which turned into a salaried position once I graduated.

I quickly married my now-cofounder Courtney and we moved to Egypt, of all places, where I worked remotely. We started a free coding bootcamp there, and when one day I found myself wanting to put the class curriculum on a simple website but not finding anything that could help, I built a simple page builder with a built-in code editor. Soon, my students started to use it, applying their HTML and CSS knowledge to build real, actual websites.

Re-facing the struggles I’d seen as an early freelancer through my students’ eyes, and seeing how Primo enabled them to access the web better than WordPress, site builders, or JS frameworks encouraged me to keep working on it part-time. After half a year of that I posted it to Hacker News, where it reached #1 and gave me enough hubris to immediately quit my job to work on it full-time. That was two years ago, Courtney joined me full-time a year ago as a UX/UI designer, and we’ve been going nonstop since then.

We’ve been fortunate enough to stay bootstrapped, with some small investments from friends and family. We’re aiming to build a sustainable business on top of Primo by selling themes on the marketplace, Primo as a hosted service, and enterprise support. If you’d like to help us along in the meantime, you can do so on our Open Collective.

What are you using (or hope to use) Primo for?

I’ve built at least a hundred Primo sites at this point. The largest and most complex one is Primo’s landing page - it’s got e-commerce (using Stripe in a SvelteKit endpoint on the backend), a blog, and lots of interactivity.

What do you spend most of your time doing?

Working on Primo, hanging out with Courtney, playing my Martin.

Where are you from/where do you live?

I’m a Venezuelan born in the US. I’ve been residing in Virginia Beach since earlier this year. I speak fluent gringo Spanish and know enough Arabic to hold a conversation with an Egyptian toddler.

[Corta]

Who are you?

Hi, I’m Courtney- Primo’s co-founder and designer. Mateo already summed up most of our Primo journey. In addition to designing bits of primo’s UI, I recently learned some html and css and a pinch of svelte to be able to build out themes. I wouldn’t be able to code and build real websites without Primo. I get super pumped whenever I learn about users who are leveraging Primo to build sites for their friends, clients, and networks in ways they couldn’t do beforehand.

What are you using Primo for?

I use primo to build small sites for friends, side projects, and sometimes client work. I spend a lot of time tweaking components’ css and adding extra touches. My favorite part of primo is the ability to apply design changes to all my site’s components by editing the CSS variables from the Site CSS.

What do you spend most of your time doing?

Working on primo, cooking, learning bass guitar, exercising, and reading.

Where are you from/where do you live?

I was born and raised in the U.S. I’ve lived in Cairo, Egypt for 4 years and since summer of this year I’ve been living in Virginia Beach. I don’t feel particularly tied to any location; I could see myself living anywhere as long as there is good company around.

[Arty]

Hi everyone!

Who are you?

I’m Arthur, just your average tech enthusiast from LA.

What are you using Primo for?

I’ve been looking for something to help me build websites that is not complicated like Wordpress, but still needed more flexibility than what other services like Webflow/Elementor/etc provide. Primo looks to be perfect for me and it’s free AND open source. I can’t wait to start building!

What do you spend most of your time doing?

Besides work I love to build useful things, adventuring outdoors, and have fun learning about anything that interests me.

[rallisf1]

Who are you?

Hi I’m John and I am a web developer since 2005. I started off with PHP/HTML/CSS and I have been a Full-Stack JS developer for the past 4 years, using and promoting svelte since early 2020. I run a small web development firm in Athens, Greece, where I live. Besides web development I have also professionally dabbled with IoT, networking, IT security, low level programming, electronic engineering and of course sales.

What are you using Primo for?

I have built over a dozen projects based on primo. Static ones I deploy to edge directly from Primo and for others I use primo as a prototyping tool and later move the code over to vscode to use in sveltekit.

What do you spend most of your time doing?

I am constantly learning new things and exploring how I can use my skills to improve what’s in front of me.

[sethcasana]

Who are you? What’s your background?

Seth here, a fellow Virginian developer, musician, and tinkerer. I spent over a decade in web development working on front end, user interface, and user experience stuff. These days, I am a performing musician, DJ, and event consultant. I have also dabbled in print media publishing, game development, and cartooning/illustration.

What are you using (or hope to use) Primo for?

I work with many clients who need a simple websites. While they don’t need it do anything complicated, they do need it to be completely obvious in how to maintain the content and exceedingly inexpensive to operate. Many of my personal creative projects could use the same thing. I have been keeping an eye on Primo since I first read about it on Hacker News and have been excited about the technological approach and guiding principles of the project. I have not built anything with the framework yet, but am eager to experiment with it now that codebase is becoming more stable.

What do you spend most of your time doing?

Trying to make music happen in as many places as possible and earn a living doing so.

Where are you from/where do you live?

Based in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

[mark1]

Who are you?

Hi I’m Mark. My background is business related, and creative. The people who know me see me as visual and artistic. I currently reside in California, but not Silicon Valley, I’m closer to the other valley in Los Angeles.

What are you using Primo for?

I found Primo via github search under keywords “CMS framework like Wordpress”. Some of my other searches were for “Svelte component editors” and “wordpress style block editor”. My thinking was how can I get a wordpress like production frontend that could be dropped into ideally Sveltekit…

What do you spend most of your time doing?

I’m starting my own web design agency, getting into publishing content, and learning to code, . I’m leaning more to HTML methodology than pure Javascript so Svelte or Vue does appeal to me versus React. I spend my time looking for “product” methods that I can adopt now and produce with that are not Wordpress or the closed systems like Wix etc. I just saw some amazing stuff where ChatbotGBT coded and output visual product in real time, so I’m looking forward to using every hack possible to make the entire process more accessible for me and the way I think.