130+ projects · 10,000+ hours · 3200+ tickets shipped
I’m Anton Hersun — founder, technical director, and lead engineer at xaverPRO. 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 practice is a small, deliberate operation. Lead engineer (me), a senior team that has shipped together for years, and a position I won’t grow past where I can still touch every project. That’s a feature, not a constraint.
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.
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 xaverPRO looks the way it does.
Completing an isolated task is rarely enough for me. I need to see the whole system: understand its logic, find where it breaks, and make the mechanism clearer, more reliable, and more useful.
That naturally draws me towards programming and technical architecture, research, data, automation, process design, and tools that make complicated work easier to reason about. The subject changes; the underlying work does not.
The useful part starts when a project needs someone to enter the subject, separate signal from noise, make the rules explicit, and assemble a working system from disconnected parts.
I am better suited to being a creator, architect, researcher, or technical lead than an executor receiving isolated instructions without the wider context.
Intellectual freedom, problems complex enough to investigate, clear rules, honest constraints, and the ability to improve the system rather than only maintain its consequences.
Just as important: trust in my judgement, quiet time for focused work, and people connected by shared ideas, responsibility, and a common outcome.
The failure mode is treating everything as another system to optimise: analysing too much, carrying too much responsibility, and continuing after the useful work is already done. Part of professional maturity is knowing when the system is good enough — and leaving some parts of life unimproved.
The best work happens when strong analysis leads to practical creation, and the work becomes an expression of who I am without consuming everything else.
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.
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.
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.
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 team is spread Germany-to-Indonesia, so when I’m offline someone usually isn’t.
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.
No SEO services. No paid ads, social media, or general marketing. No subcontracting outside a trusted team — 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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