Sandipan Das

1. 01

   I ask before I type

   A client once messaged me at 11pm, panicking because the project had stopped halfway and the site was half-broken. Before I touched a single line of code, I spent an hour just asking questions — who visits this site, what are they supposed to do when they land on it, what's actually losing you money right now.

   Most people expect a developer to start typing immediately. I'd rather understand the problem first, because a beautiful site that doesn't do its job is just an expensive brochure nobody reads.

2. 02

   I'll talk you out of the safe choice

   I've had clients insist on WordPress because "that's what everyone uses", and I've had to gently talk them out of it. One small-business owner wanted a lightning-fast site for a product launch. WordPress would've worked, technically, but every plugin she wanted would've slowed it down another half-second, and half-seconds add up to lost customers on mobile. I built her site in Next.js instead.

   It wasn't the safe choice, but it was the right one for what she actually needed. I'd rather have that slightly uncomfortable conversation upfront than hand someone a site that quietly underperforms for years.

3. 03

   Sometimes the job is saying no

   A client once asked me to bury their contact button at the very bottom of a long homepage, because a competitor's site did it that way. I could've just built it — it was a five-minute change. Instead I told him straight: burying your contact info doesn't make you look exclusive, it makes people give up and call your competitor instead. He pushed back at first. I showed him a couple of examples of why it mattered, and he changed his mind.

   That's the job, honestly — not just writing code, but knowing when to say "I don't think that's a good idea" even if it's easier to just nod along.

The story so far

How I started

The first site I built was a single page for a small business, and I was hooked. I started taking freelance work in 2017 — WordPress and PHP, small budgets, a lot of late nights — and learned the job one client at a time.

By 2019 the reviews had added up to a top-rated Fiverr profile. In 2021 I moved to full-stack JavaScript, because the projects had grown into applications, not just pages. The stack I work in today:

• React
• Next.js
• Node.js
• Express
• Laravel
• WordPress

In 2026 I founded DevsKing ↗: premium SEO tools — site audit, keyword research, rank tracking, backlinks, AI visibility — plus done-for-you SEO, built for small and medium-sized business websites. The SEO specialists on this team work with those tools on every site we build.

What hasn't changed: I still read every brief myself.