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.

[SrGeneroso]

Who are you? What’s your background?

I’m a tinker fascinated with web tech, game dev, photography, cars, woodwork, edutaiment, open-source, domotics… the list is proportionally inverted to my capacity to focus.

I’ve being around computers and alike for 25 years but my work experience has been related with cars, first as an “engineer” in a GT race team (you must always buy black laptops if you are going to get your hands dirty) and later in sales for automotive spare part retail. I did many years in that field not because my love of cars but because there is a huge need for IT in that field.

In my spare time tried to build some apps to improve productivity or to manage garage shops. But, to be honest, the automotive world is a hard closed market and most businesses and workers don’t mind or care much about better IT (ms-excel runs most of small business and lots of huge ones) so I decided to move along and focus on my true love, web and computers.

For some time managed some WP sites but it made my soul cry. 99% of the time a simple static site was sufficient, maybe some JAMstack if they were an e-shop, but is sad how much computing was wasted for webs that went un-updated for years, and the time involved in fixing security nonsense of this overdone platform.
But still, no, they had to be WP because owners wanted to be able to “easily” create content and add facebook widgets, to later complain because they have to add GDPR banners and such. What a lack of imagination.

What do you spend most of your time doing?

So lately I’ve being experimenting with some JAM, some cloud, some serverless, some UI libraries, some virtualization… I guess I’ve rm -rf and started fresh to look for some combination of tech that could end the global madness that is WP.

I love Svelte and SK, so I’ve being focused on solutions that include them to the point of even refactoring some CMSs using react or vue, but I’m not that good of a developer so I could take a fairly advanced project and fully understand it.

I’ve look also into visual scripting. Doing some game development I tried Unreal Engine Blueprints, they are amazing, they are similar to Node-Red scripting (if you don’t know any of those go to check them, so good) and I’ve being experimenting with that kind of technology since. I think something like this could breach the barrier between devs and the general population.

Finally I’ve being trying a lot of serverless and cloud but man, what a deep rabbit hole is that. There is no problem that money can’t fix with those, but I’m looking into a minimalist approach and that is harder to achieve without vendor lock-in or extreme complexity.

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

So, finally, I’ve found Primo CMS, what a delight, it ticked more checkboxes that I was looking for and it promotes and uses most of the principles I’m excited about. To be honest, I’m in very early stage of discovering of this platform, so the love is still in the air, but more than that, I feel like is early enough in the development as I could “understand” the magic on the background and maybe even help to fix and shape it.

I would like to use Primo as an WordPress killer. That’s an big ugly monster to defeat, but it has many use cases where it could be ideal. I want to feel relief giving my clients, my family or my friends, a platform were they are not lost, not afraid of breaking, not locked, not unsafe, not wasting money…

Lastly I want to learn how this platforms work, I think there is a lot of value on building “apps for dummies” as I’ve worked with very technical people, just not computer geeks, that were totally lost and unable to perform what they should be capable of because, even sometimes I forget it, computers aren’t that easy at all. So maybe I’ll learn something that could help me build better apps in the future.

Where are you from/where do you live?

BTW, I’m from Spain, in a town near Madrid. I speak decent english but I would love to improve it so please correct me anytime (my code too, please).

[bombastic]

Who are you?

Hi Everyone, am Abdelfatah Ahmed - your average somali ethusiastic about new technologies, i was on of the students of Mateo and Courta in Egypt Bootcamp.

Am a Refugee but that didn’t stop me from continuing my education in University (Cairo university) as Computer Science but things didn’t go according to my plans and got drop out of University because schoolship issues then i decided life doesn’t stop and looking for Job, landing a job as Receptions for NGO that helps refugees with limited services - it was great joy to help other Refugees who are dismotivated by life in Cairo and lack of opportunity. I met Mateo and Courta through a colleague (friend) from work and enrolled the bootcamp, from there something ingnited me about css magics and front-end - since then i daily try to challenge myself with complex designs (paid ones) to create them.

What are you using Primo for?

I usually Primo to build an NGO i work for and freelancing with clients, i really love on the process of Primo since the beginning late 2019.

What do you spend most of your time doing?

beside working for an NGO in egypt as IT and Web developer - i exercise and build/learn about selfhosting, IoT, networking and security news.

I love learning new ways to fix issues with tech (especially scripts).

Where are you from/where do you live?

From Somalia, i live in Cairo Egypt since 2006.