Valeria Builds — Maker of Things

I left a career of meetings that could've been emails to build the freedom to decide what's next.

I'm Valeria. Trained as a mobile developer — React Native, Kotlin, years of it — and now I put that time into a print-on-demand Shopify store and a hidden-object game, chasing something specific: my own hours, my own place, and enough room to choose what comes next.

Get in touch See what I make

Next up

Next stop: Spain

Departing October 15, 12:00

Google Maps route from home to Spain, roughly 3,236 km and 33 hours of driving — fig. 2 — the route, roughly

I've got a road trip to Spain coming up with my wife, our daughter, and the dog — ten days down by car, ten weeks there, ten days back. The first real test of a life built to travel with all of us: the shop keeps taking orders while we're gone, the game doesn't care what country I write code in, and for the next three months "the office" is wherever I've got wifi and decent coffee.

No itinerary carved in stone. That's kind of the point — deciding what's next as I go, not months in advance.

By carLocation-independent

The main thing

The shop

fig. 3 — storefront, flat

My main focus: a Shopify store running on print-on-demand. I design the products, POD providers print and ship them, and I run everything in between — the storefront, the listings, the launches, the numbers.

Every mockup, banner, and product graphic is mine. No agency, no stock templates — just a lot of late evenings pushing pixels around until a design earns its spot in the catalog.

ShopifyCanvaKittl

The game

Paws and Seek

fig. 4 — the cat, hidden

A cozy hidden-object game I'm building in Unity. You search hand-drawn scenes for a very well-hidden cat, at your own pace.

No timers, no energy bars, no pop-ups begging you to come back. Just nice pictures and the small satisfaction of finally spotting the thing that was there the whole time.

UnityC#Aseprite

Hobby

Very small houses, assembled slowly

Miniature Corner Coffee Shop room box, lit from inside, with a bookshelf-lined café seen through the shop window and an open door — fig. 5 — the corner coffee shop, lights on

My hobby: miniature house kits — 1:12 rooms I put together and finish by hand, down to the wooden floorboards, the tiny books, and a lamp that actually turns on.

It's the opposite of shipping software: no deadline, no meetings, no one asking for a status update. Just a craft knife, some glue, and a lot of patience. Most of what I know about light and texture, I learned in a box the size of a shoebox.

Miniature library room box with a dinosaur skeleton, staircases, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a glowing globe

Photos coming soon — swap these in for real build shots.

About

Me, minus the résumé

I spent years building mobile apps inside other companies — React Native, Kotlin, a lot of Android. Then I stopped, and started building my own things instead.

I think everyone's responsible for their own happiness, and mine wasn't going to come from an open-plan office. So now it's just me and my own projects — a shop, a game, a lot of tiny houses — building toward the actual goal: being my own boss, setting my own hours, working from wherever I want, and having enough financial room to decide what's next instead of asking permission.