About

One engineer, twenty-three years on the web, hundreds of shipped projects.

100+ WordPress projects · 7,200+ hours · 3,000+ tickets shipped

I’m Anton Hersun — founder, technical director, and lead engineer at . The first sites I shipped were in 2003: school portals, a city info-site, and small online shops that ran on hand-rolled PHP and a back-office accounting layer most users never saw. Commercial work started the same year. PHP became my main tool in 2010 once I’d outgrown the early tooling, Laravel arrived around 2016, white-label work for agencies in 2019, and the last few years have also been about putting AI into production without it falling over.

The studio is a small, deliberate operation. One lead engineer (me), a stable bench of contractors I’ve worked with for years, and a position that I won’t grow past where I can still touch every project. That’s a feature, not a constraint.

Manifesto
The agencies I work with don’t need another vendor. They need a developer who reads the brief, asks the questions that matter, ships on the date they committed to — or flags a slip in writing before it lands — and works without needing to be managed. That’s the bar. Everything else is decoration.
— Anton
Founder & lead engineer · xaver.pro
Timeline

Twenty-three years of shipping.

Not a CV. The handful of moments that shaped how I work today — what I learned the hard way, what I now refuse to do, and why looks the way it does.

2003
First commercial web work + first international partnership
Online shops, info-sites, a city portal, and the back-office accounting layer that ran behind them — everything in raw PHP, paid for by real customers from week one. The same year, first international partnership: a wholesaler in Portland, US, distributing memory cards, batteries, and other small electronics — their site, their internal tools.
2005
First taste of SEO
Picked up SEO during early commercial work and watched first real ranking wins land. That period spent on the marketing side gave me an inside view of what agencies are actually optimising for — context I still draw on when shipping their builds today.
2008
Moved to frameworks
Started moving off raw PHP into structured frameworks and added new tools to the stack as projects grew more complex.
2010
Online shops at scale, business inside view
Continued building online shops, but the work shifted — every project meant getting under the hood of how the business actually ran: pricing, fulfilment, accounting, supplier relationships. That’s where the path to running discovery and scope myself started.
2013
Started a programming school
Set up a small programming school to train developers from scratch. The best graduates joined the agency — and we’re still working together today, as colleagues and friends.
2014
Expanded the international roster, moved into management
As the team grew, we could take on more international work and bigger scopes. That’s also when I started shifting from hands-on engineering into project management and oversight.
2015
Took on full PM & business-analyst scope
Stopped accepting briefs as black boxes — started running discovery, scope, and risk profile myself before any quote.
2019
First long-term agency partnerships
Started building long-term partnerships with agencies, alongside continuing direct client work. Many of the agencies I work with today came in with briefs years ago — we still ship together, still keep in touch, and I’ve met many face-to-face, from the US to Asia.
2022
Broadened the stack — AI, DevOps, server support
Started going deep on the AI side: embeddings, inference, first hands-on builds with Claude and other LLMs. Same year, built out DevOps practice (Docker, CI/CD), opened server support as a service line, and shipped a lot of in-house tooling we still use today.
2024
Deeper into project management
Took on more project management, less keyboard time. Several dormant builds got moving again, long-tail backlogs finally drained, and a lot of work that had been waiting on someone’s attention finally shipped.
2026
, five practice areas
Today: WordPress, Laravel/Livewire, AI, infrastructure, support. Mostly white-label, some direct. Long-term partnerships with a handful of agencies; new partners start with a calibration batch. Working on: staying small enough to still write code.
Operating principles

How I actually work, day to day.

PRINCIPLE 01

On your tools, on your hours

I work in whatever messenger, email, or call tool you already use — I won’t ask you to install something new. Calls get recorded, transcribed, and run through AI to pull the actual scope out of the conversation, so nothing said live disappears into someone’s notebook. I’m reachable from morning to late evening; response time is measured in hours, not days.

PRINCIPLE 02

Brief, then build

Every project opens with a written brief — full scope, the open questions surfaced, agreed hours, sign-off — before the first commit lands. No verbal-only kickoffs, no «we’ll work it out as we go». If a requirement isn’t in the brief, it’s a new scope conversation, not a free addition. The brief stays the contract for the engagement.

PRINCIPLE 03

Fixed hours, not fixed price

Every estimate is a number of hours, not a sticker price. If scope shifts mid-project — new requirements off the brief, a wider rebuild than first scoped — we re-quote in writing before the work happens, never after. Whatever changes, you see it before the next invoice.

PRINCIPLE 04

Follow the sun

My working window is 8 AM to midnight Bangkok time (UTC+7) — overlaps US afternoons, the full EU day, and Asia mornings. US partners hand work off at end-of-day and pick it back up next morning, ready to ship. The bench is spread Germany-to-Vietnam, so when I’m offline someone usually isn’t.

PRINCIPLE 05

Updates, no theatre

Updates land when the work asks for it — a milestone shipped, a question that needs your input, a blocker that needs unsticking — plus whenever you ask. No daily check-ins, no slide decks, no executive summary just because the calendar said so. Cadence matches the work, not the calendar.

PRINCIPLE 06

What I won’t do

No SEO services. No paid ads, social media, or general marketing. No subcontracting outside a trusted bench — every line of code goes through people I’ve worked with for years. No direct-to-client work that competes with agency partners. The boundaries protect the bar.

PRINCIPLE 07

References, with the partner agency's go-ahead

When an agency wants references, we connect them with one of our existing partner agencies — over messenger or email, whichever you both prefer. Direct questions, direct answers. NDA signed when the partner agency requires it, so identity stays between you and them.

PRINCIPLE 08

First engagement is a calibration batch

First engagement is a calibration batch. On a WordPress build, that’s a small scope — typically 10–30 hours, often a single landing page or a small backlog of tickets — so both sides learn the other’s workflow, Figma conventions, and QA standards before committing to a 200-hour rebuild. The batch is real billable work, not a free trial; calibration is what we get from it, not the deliverable.

Off the clock

What I do when I’m not shipping.

Long-form reading

Mostly productivity, psychology, project management, and business — plus the technical reading the day job pulls in. Not much fiction in the rotation; reading that pays itself back at the keyboard.

Travel, often

Twenty countries and counting. Some trips have doubled as meeting agency partners face-to-face — from the US to Asia — but most are just because being away from the keyboard for a few weeks resets the head better than anything else.

🛵

Two-wheel therapy

Best thing I know: a scooter on a long scenic route. Winding back-roads, no destination in particular, just the next bend. Closest I get to deliberate slowness in a working week.

🧭

Restless curiosity

Routes, places, tools, tech — I’d rather try ten and keep the two that actually work than read about them in passing. The same instinct runs the day job: most of what we ship started as a side experiment that earned its way in.

Want to work together?

Send the brief — Figma, repo, written scope. Within 24 hours I reply with NDA if needed, sharp questions, and a fixed-hours estimate.

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