Integrals: Where I Learned Web Development by Doing It
A small web studio in Tbilisi, a lot of client meetings, and two years of building websites between 2016 and 2018.
At the beginning of 2016 I was a student at Georgian Technical University, studying the construction of roads, streets and railways. It was a technical field, but not informatics. I had been writing code on my own for a while, and that winter I decided it was time to do it for money.
My reasoning was simple. Tbilisi is a large city with a lot of businesses, and I assumed that someone, somewhere, would let a beginner start at a modest rate. So I did the obvious thing and started asking friends and acquaintances whether they knew of any work.
One of them was Tigran. He did not ask for a CV or a portfolio. He invited me to the office.
The test project
Integrals was a small web studio with an office on Rustaveli Avenue, a few minutes from the Rustaveli metro station. It had been running since 2015, so when I arrived it was about a year old. Tigran and his friend Beka ran the work with clients.
Before anything else, they gave me a test project: a multilingual website for a cosmetics shop, built in a blog style, with articles and a photo gallery. I built what they asked for, they were happy with it, and that was the interview.
Officially, Tigran said, I would start in support. In practice the label did not last long.
The studio
The team was small. Two developers who were called backend developers but worked across the whole stack. A web designer who also did the markup. A general helper who leaned toward the frontend. And me.
There was no fixed salary for my role. I was paid per project, which suited a student who also had exams to pass.
The studio worked from a price list with three main tiers:
- a personal website, usually a single page or a few;
- a multi-page website with several languages and galleries;
- an online shop, the most expensive option, because it involved a product catalog and automatic payments through a bank.
Most of what we built fell somewhere on that list: websites for hotels, tour operators, restaurants, shops and individuals. Over two years I worked on tens of them. Most were written from scratch; the rest were bug fixes, refactoring, or rewrites of something another developer had left behind.
The clients
Most of the studio’s clients were local Georgian businesses. My own share looked different. Because my English was stronger than anyone else’s on the team, the projects with foreign clients often came to me. Many of them were business owners from Middle Eastern countries who had settled in Tbilisi, with offices, hotels and restaurants on and around Agmashenebeli Avenue, near the Marjanishvili metro station.
We rarely met them in our own office. We met them where they preferred: in their offices, in their restaurants, at McDonald’s, Wendy’s or Subway, in a parked car, or in a garden. Some preferred to settle everything by phone.
My role at those meetings was clear. Tigran and Beka negotiated; I translated. I did not speak Arabic, so English was the common ground. I was not the owner and did not pretend to be a negotiator. My job was to make sure that what the client said about features, colors, logos, pages and languages reached our side intact, and that our answer reached theirs.
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One habit of those foreign clients surprised me at first. Even when ordering the whole website at once would have been cheaper, many of them preferred to build it piece by piece: one part, then payment, then the next part, then payment again. It cost them more, but it gave them control over every step, and we adapted to it.
How we built things
The stack was as simple as it gets. Vanilla PHP on the server. HTML, CSS and Bootstrap on the client. For the design, the web designer usually started from a free template and reshaped it around the client’s colors and logo.
There was no Git. We exchanged code as zip archives over Skype, and when a project was already live, I uploaded the files to the hosting over FTP. It sounds risky now, and in principle it was, but in practice it almost never went wrong, for a plain reason: we almost never worked on the same project, let alone the same file.
Two things I built there were noticed by the team.
The first was a reusable admin panel. Instead of writing content management from scratch for every client, I built a general one that could be dropped into any site: something like a very light WordPress dashboard, but in our own vanilla PHP, so there were no plugin updates to break anything.
The second was using AJAX so that pages could update without a full reload. Today that is the default behavior of almost every web application. In a small studio in 2016 it felt like a step forward, and the team liked it immediately.
A word that means two things
Translating taught me something about language as well.
During one meeting, Tigran was speaking English to a client and stopped in the middle of a sentence. He turned to me and asked how to say the Georgian word chveneba in English. I said: show. He continued, stopped again a minute later, and asked the same question. I said show again. When it happened a third time, I told him I had already answered.
“I know what show means,” he said. “I’m asking how to say chveneba.”
That was the moment we both understood the problem. For him, show was a noun: a TV show, a performance. He had not realized that the same word is also the ordinary verb for showing something. After that, he never asked again.
Working remotely
Most of my work for Integrals was done from home. My first projects were written in my hometown, Gori, and later, back in Tbilisi, I kept working from home and came to the office or to client meetings when they were needed.
Everything went through Skype and the phone. Tasks arrived as messages, code went back as zip archives, and live sites were updated over FTP. There was no shared repository and no daily stand-up, just a clear understanding of what had to be delivered and by when.
It was my first experience of remote work, years before it became normal for the industry.
Moving on
In 2018, after two years at Integrals, I moved to a commercial bank. The two had nothing to do with each other. It was simply a step toward more formal employment: a fixed contract, an established organization and a different kind of engineering.
I left the studio, but not the people.
What stayed
Tigran and Beka are my friends today. We have celebrated birthdays together, sometimes in Gori and sometimes in Tbilisi. Long after I left, I went back to Agmashenebeli Avenue with one of them to help translate at a meeting, and I helped the other with the JavaScript for a client who wanted bookings made directly on a calendar.
The connection came back in a more unexpected way in 2021. A colleague of mine was looking for a team that worked with vanilla PHP. The project was an old, half-forgotten website about Georgia, created years earlier by a foreign tourist who had visited the country by chance, fallen in love with it, and decided to document its cultural heritage. I recommended Integrals. They took the project and rewrote the site successfully.
As for what those two years taught me: almost everything, because all of it was practice. Talking to clients. Translating not only words but requirements. Estimating work. Building without a safety net. Testing my own code because nobody else would. Delivering on time from a different city.
None of it came from a lecture. It came from a cosmetics shop website, tens of projects after it, and a lot of meetings over fast food.
Where did you learn the job: at university, at your first company, or somewhere less formal? I’d be interested to hear how other developers got their start. 👇
