Welcome to HackerNoon’s Meet the Writer Interview series, where we learn a bit more about the contributors that have written some of our favorite stories. Welcome to HackerNoon’s Meet the Writer Interview series, where we learn a bit more about the contributors that have written some of our favorite stories. Meet the Writer Meet the Writer favorite stories So let’s start! Tell us a bit about yourself. For example, name, profession, and personal interests. I’ve been building in IT since the early 2000s. I started building my own business while I was still at university and have been on that path ever since. What defines my work is that I’m not very interested in incremental products. I tend to work on things that shift how a category works. For example, around 2007 we built one of the first live chat platforms for websites. At the time, this wasn’t a standard tool, and we ended up helping push that market forward as it grew. In 2014, I built a company around mobile widgets for websites, something that later became obvious, but at that moment wasn’t widely explored. Even earlier, in 2006, I created a prototype of a language model as part of my university work and tried to train it using real user conversations. Looking back, it was a very early version of ideas that are mainstream today. Around that time, I was also experimenting with interface formats. For example, in the early 2000s we built a single-page website for a web studio, something that felt very unusual back then, when most sites were multi-page with navigation menus. After several years in financial consulting, I came back to product building to focus on ideas that are less about features and more about changing how people interact with digital systems. Right now I’m building two projects: Honoramma and Prefogram. Honoramma Prefogram Interesting! What was your latest Hackernoon Top story about? It’s about building real products with AI, without hiring a team. The core idea is that many projects people used to postpone because of lack of budget or experience are now actually doable. Do you usually write on similar topics? If not, what do you usually write about? I don’t usually write at all. This is more of an exception. I started sharing recently because I realized that some of the things that feel obvious from inside product building are not obvious from the outside. Before that, the only major article I wrote was about 13 years ago. It was about building FPV drones as a hobby project and reached around 250K views, which was unexpected. Great! What is your usual writing routine like (if you have one?) No routine. I write when I feel there’s something worth explaining clearly. Being a writer in tech can be a challenge. It’s not often our main role, but an addition to another one. What is the biggest challenge you have when it comes to writing? Switching context. Building and writing require very different mental modes, and I naturally gravitate toward building. What is the next thing you hope to achieve in your career? Right now I’m focused on two projects that are both about changing existing paradigms. Honoramma is an attempt to rethink memory and legacy online. Instead of static profiles, it’s about interactive spaces you can actually explore. Prefogram is focused on a more fundamental problem: how people understand each other online. Today, social networks force you to reconstruct a person from fragments: posts, photos, random activity. It’s incomplete and often misleading. You can spend hours scrolling and still not really understand who someone is. Prefogram approaches this differently. It structures a person’s preferences in a way that makes them immediately understandable. The goal is not just better recommendations, but a different model of communication and matching between people. Social networks optimize for content consumption. Prefogram is about understanding people. In both cases, the goal is not to build “another product”, but to shift how people think about these categories. Wow, that’s admirable. Now, something more casual: What is your guilty pleasure of choice? Probably games with strong social dynamics, like Mafia. Do you have a non-tech-related hobby? If yes, what is it? Outside of tech, I’m into aviation, sailing, piano, drawing, and chess. I’m generally interested in learning new skills. It’s fascinating to observe yourself in that process, especially at the stage where you’re not confident yet and have to train both your mind and your body. I also like the idea that different activities develop different parts of you. For example, learning piano is known to strengthen neural connections, and social games like Mafia are great for testing intuition. Intuition is one of the most important tools in life, especially when it comes to understanding people. What can the Hacker Noon community expect to read from you next? If I continue writing, it will likely be about real product building with AI. Not theory, but what actually works and what doesn’t. Maybe also some breakdowns of mistakes and edge cases that don’t get talked about enough. What’s your opinion on HackerNoon as a platform for writers? It feels more product-focused than many other platforms. There’s less noise and more interest in practical experience, which I think is valuable. Thanks for taking time to join our “Meet the writer” series. It was a pleasure. Do you have any closing words? Meet the writer To everyone building their own projects, I wish a lot of luck and persistence.

Between Two Computer Monitors: This story includes an interview between the writer and guest/interviewee. 

Cursor Your Dream, Part 2: How to Move From First Prompt to First Working App

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Meet the Writer: Hacker Noon's Contributor Pavel Manovich, Founder & Product Builder

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