Hi, I'm Gabo
12+ years building products · PhD Researcher · Open-Source Contributor · Ruse, Bulgaria
I'm probably the kind of person who takes apart things to understand how they work – and then spends way too much time trying to put them back together better than they were before – with spare parts left. If you are interested how to Gabo.
I'm based in Ruse, Bulgaria, where I live with my wife and spend most weekends these days renovating our apartment. Again.(x3) For some reason, it always needs something fixed, upgraded, or completely redone, but I actually enjoy the hands-on work.
When I'm not wielding power tools, I'm usually deep in some kind of a tech project. I'm a bit of a hobby DIY builder – the kind who sets up home servers, renovates the bathroom, automates things that probably don't need automating, and genuinely gets excited about making technology work seamlessly in the background.
The 12-year winding road
My professional journey has been all over the place, but there's a common thread: I'm ridiculously hands-on and product-oriented about everything I touch. Working as support taught me that feedback is usually gathered all wrong – people don't understand it, or worse, they think they do but completely miss the point.
I'll never forget this one hardware company where customers asked for a connector with 'more bandwidth.' The product person thought they understood but didn't want to ask for clarification. So we manufactured 250-ish units with completely wrong connectors. When we placed them on the website, customers were absolutely flabbergasted – an expensive lesson in why assumptions kill products.
The PhD rabbit hole
These days, I'm juggling multiple roles while finishing my PhD research on methods and tools for automatic analysis and knowledge extraction from unstructured data collected through user opinion processing - you can find my research publications here. As a former founder, I'm proud we sold Bimbala.com - a SaaS tool for gathering and structuring user feedback - to another team who wanted to take it further. Not every exit is a unicorn story, but seeing your work live on in someone else's hands feels pretty good.
The thing that keeps me going
What really drives me is getting useful information to people who can't afford the fancy solutions. Sometimes that's through products I build, sometimes it's just sharing what I've learned the hard way or by the books I'm writing at the moment.
In my spare time, you'll find me tinkering with cars, exploring topics that probably shouldn't fascinate me as much as they do, or trying to convince my wife that yes, we really do need another home server. Life's too short not to be curious about how things work – and how to make them work better. I also occasionally speak at conferences and meetups about WordPress, performance, and product.
What people say
"Gabo has a rare ability to turn messy, contradictory user feedback into a clear product direction. He helped us identify patterns we had completely missed - and explained the reasoning in a way the whole team could act on immediately."
"I brought Gabo in to look at our WooCommerce store's performance. He found bottlenecks I had written off as 'just how WordPress is' and fixed them in a few days. The difference in load time was immediately visible in our conversion numbers."
"Gabriel brings a rare combination of engineering pragmatism and research rigour. His work on automated feedback analysis is some of the most practically applicable research I have encountered - it does not sit on a shelf."
"Whether it's shipping code, debugging production fires, or giving a talk in front of 300 people, Gabo brings the same level of care and curiosity to all of it. That consistency is surprisingly rare."
"The onboarding changes Gabo recommended reduced our early churn noticeably - but what stuck with me was that he never just handed over a list of fixes. He walked us through the why behind every decision."
"Gabo is the kind of person who reads the code, reads the data, and reads the room. He helped us ship a feedback loop that actually worked - not just a form that disappeared into a spreadsheet nobody opened."