Stay Weird
In Korea, there's a word people use when someone steps outside the expected path: 독특하다. It means unique, but the way it's usually said carries a quiet undertone — something closer to that's... an unusual choice. Not hostile, not encouraging. Just a gentle reminder that you've been noticed deviating.
I heard it a lot when I was eighteen.
The Year I Did Nothing
Everyone around me was preparing for university. In Korea, that sentence barely needs context — it's less of a decision and more of a current. You study, you test, you enter. The system is built around it. The social expectation is built around it. The rhythm of an entire generation's late adolescence is built around it.
I got a job at a coffee shop instead.
It wasn't rebellion. It wasn't a grand philosophical stance. I just didn't know what I wanted to study, and spending four years and someone's savings figuring that out felt dishonest. So I pulled espresso shots, cleaned machines at closing, saved what I could, and when I had enough, I left.
I traveled for about a year. No itinerary, no objective, no five-year plan informing the route. If that sounds romantic, it wasn't — at least not consistently. A lot of it was just being alone in unfamiliar places, not understanding signs, eating things I couldn't identify, and sitting in silence with the kind of boredom that eventually cracks open into something else.
But that cracking open is the whole point.
When you remove the structure — the class schedule, the career ladder, the social calendar that tells you where to be and who to become — you're left with a question that most systems are designed to help you avoid: What do I actually want?
I didn't answer it during that year. But I started hearing it clearly for the first time. And that mattered more than any answer would have.
What Travel Opens (And What It Doesn't)
I want to be careful here, because "I traveled and it changed my life" is one of the most overused sentences in the English language. So let me be specific about what changed.
It wasn't that I saw beautiful places. It wasn't that I met interesting people, although I did. What changed was my frame. In Korea, I had one version of what a life looks like — study, career, stability, respect. Abroad, I met people living by completely different definitions. Some were freelancers working from cafés. Some were artists who measured success in finished pieces, not income. Some were older, some younger, some clearly struggling and still choosing their path over the easier one.
In my sixth country, I fell in love. She didn't speak my language. I didn't speak hers. It didn't last — it wasn't built to last — but it didn't need to. What it did was prove something I hadn't understood before: that connection doesn't require a shared system. That two people with completely different maps can still find each other at the same coordinates, even if just for a moment. My first love happened in a place where I couldn't read street signs, and somehow that's the most honest thing that's ever happened to me.
None of the people I met were wrong. And that realization — that there are many valid ways to build a life, to connect, to love, to work — is not something you can learn from a book. You have to feel it. You have to sit across from someone whose life makes no sense by your old framework and realize that they're not lost. They just drew a different map.
That's what the year gave me. Not a direction. A permission.
Teaching Myself to Build
I came back to Korea and started learning to code.
There's no dramatic origin story here. No single moment of inspiration. I was interested in how websites worked, I had a laptop, and the internet is full of free education for anyone stubborn enough to sit with confusion for long enough. So I sat with it.
The early months were brutal in the way that all self-teaching is brutal — not because the material is impossibly hard, but because there's no external structure holding you accountable. No professor checking in. No classmate to compare notes with. No grade to tell you whether you're on track. You just wake up, open the editor, and decide to keep going. Or you don't.
I kept going.
Over time, the fragmented tutorials and half-built projects started to cohere into actual skill. React, then Next.js, then backends, then databases, then the full picture of how a modern web application breathes. And somewhere in that process, something unexpected happened: I realized I didn't just want to write code. I wanted to build things — complete experiences where the design, the interaction, and the engineering all served a single idea.
That instinct is what eventually became Space Iguana.
Why Estonia
When I decided to start an agency, the first question wasn't what should we build. It was where should this company exist.
Korea was the obvious answer, but obvious answers deserve scrutiny. I was working remotely, serving international clients, thinking in English as much as Korean. Registering a Korean entity would mean navigating a system built for a different kind of business — one with a physical office, local employees, and a domestic market focus.
Estonia's e-Residency program offered something different: a digital-first legal identity. An EU-registered company, a real business structure, legitimate banking — all without needing to be physically present in Tallinn. For a solo founder running a remote agency across time zones, the practicality was hard to argue with.
There's something poetic about it too, even if that wasn't the reason. A twenty-one-year-old in Seoul, running a European company called Space Iguana, building websites for clients who have no idea where I'm sitting when I reply to their emails. The whole setup is a little absurd. But absurdity and functionality aren't mutually exclusive. Sometimes the weird choice is also the smart one.
Developer + Design Agency = ?
People sometimes find the combination confusing. You're a developer — why run a design agency?
The honest answer is that I don't think the distinction matters as much as the industry pretends it does. A website is not a collection of separate deliverables — design over here, code over there, content somewhere in between. A website is a single experience, and the best ones are built by people who understand all the layers at once.
When I design, I'm thinking about what the code will need to do. When I write code, I'm thinking about how the interaction will feel. That overlap isn't a limitation — it's the whole advantage. It means fewer handoffs, fewer misunderstandings, fewer moments where a beautiful mockup becomes a compromised product because the designer and the developer were never really speaking the same language.
Space Iguana exists in that overlap. It's small on purpose. The work is better when the person making decisions about layout is the same person writing the functions that make it move.
What "Stay Weird" Actually Means
It doesn't mean be random. It doesn't mean be contrarian for the sake of it. It doesn't mean dye your hair green and call yourself a creative.
Stay weird means: trust the version of your life that doesn't fit the template.
When I skipped university, that was weird. When I spent a year doing nothing that looks productive on a résumé, that was weird. When I taught myself to code instead of attending a bootcamp or getting a degree, that was weird. When I registered a company in a Baltic country I've never set foot in, that was very weird.
But none of those choices were random. Each one followed from a quiet internal logic — a sense that the conventional path, however safe, wasn't mine. And that following someone else's map, no matter how well-drawn, would eventually lead me somewhere I didn't want to be.
Stay weird is the refusal to optimize for legibility. It's choosing the path that makes sense to you even when it doesn't make sense to anyone watching. It's the belief that a life built on genuine curiosity — even if it looks chaotic from the outside — will eventually cohere into something more honest than a life built on compliance.
That's what Space Iguana is. A weird company, with a weird name, run by someone who took a weird path to get here. And the work is better for it. Not in spite of the weirdness — because of it.
A Note to Anyone Feeling Weird Right Now
If you're eighteen and everyone around you is heading to university and you're not sure that's your path — it's okay to pause. It's okay to pour coffee for a while. It's okay to not know.
If you're teaching yourself something and it feels impossibly slow and lonely — that's what it feels like. It doesn't mean you're failing. It means you're in the middle. The middle always feels like nowhere.
If your career doesn't fit into a single job title, if your company doesn't look like other companies, if your life doesn't follow the arc that everyone told you it should — that's not a problem to fix. That's your design. That's your weird.
Stay there.
STAY WEIRD 🦎🚀