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    <title>elias</title>
    <link>https://eli6s.dev</link>
    <description>19-year-old software engineer and founder based in Lebanon.</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <lastBuildDate>Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:09:52 GMT</lastBuildDate>
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      <title><![CDATA[On building gnost: what 3+ years of freelancing actually looks like]]></title>
      <link>https://eli6s.dev/blog/on-building-gnost</link>
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      <pubDate>Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
      <description><![CDATA[Starting a freelance practice at 16 with no clients, no reputation, and no idea what I was doing.]]></description>
      <content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I started gnost when I was 16. No clients, no reputation, no real idea what I was doing, just a Discord server where someone said they'd pay me to build a bot, and I said yes before I knew how.</p>
<h2 id="what-i-actually-build">What I actually build</h2>
<p>Custom Discord bots. Mostly for communities that have outgrown the off-the-shelf options — economy systems tuned to their specific game, moderation logic that doesn't exist anywhere, integrations that pull data from places no public bot touches.</p>
<p>Everything runs in Python with PostgreSQL or SQLite depending on scale. Three years in, I've got a decent sense of what breaks in production. The answer is usually: whatever you were most confident about.</p>
<h2 id="the-thing-nobody-tells-you">The thing nobody tells you</h2>
<p>Freelance at 16 means you're doing everything. You're the engineer, the PM, the support team, and the person explaining to a client at 11pm why their leaderboard reset. You get good at scoping fast, or you burn out fast. Sometimes both.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The hardest skill I built wasn't technical. It was learning to say "that's out of scope" without losing the client.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>$4,000+ in revenue. 30+ bots. 600,000+ total users. For a 19-year-old running a one-person operation from Beirut, that means something.</p>
<h2 id="where-its-going">Where it's going</h2>
<p>gnost is still running. I take on projects when they're interesting. But my main focus has shifted — I want to get deeper into systems, closer to the metal. The bot work taught me what production software looks like from the outside. Now I want to know what it looks like from the inside.</p>]]></content:encoded>
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      <category>python</category>
      <category>gnost</category>
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