Get to Know Me: The Person Behind Nickest

Get to Know Me

Hi, I am Nikke Marttila.

Depending on where you know me from, you may also have seen me use Nikke, Nick or simply Nickest.

I am a Finnish web developer, information technology student, former taxi entrepreneur and someone who has probably started more online projects than would be reasonable to list here.

That last part is probably the most accurate introduction.

I have always been interested in creating things, testing ideas and finding unconventional ways to make money. Sometimes that has meant building websites for customers. Sometimes it has meant planning digital products, experimenting with AI, studying new technology or trying to turn a strange idea into something that could actually work.

Nickest is where all of those interests come together.

It is my personal brand, experimental workspace and growing collection of resources for freelancers, side hustlers, vibe coders and other people who want to build useful things online.

My Path Has Not Been Particularly Linear

I did not follow one perfectly planned career path from school into a comfortable development job.

I have worked in customer service, driven taxis, operated my own taxi business and worked as a freelance web developer. I am currently studying information technology while continuing to build my own projects and explore where AI-assisted development is taking the industry.

Working in taxis and customer service may sound unrelated to web development, but those experiences taught me things that are surprisingly useful in business.

You learn how different people communicate. You learn that everybody has their own pressures, expectations and ways of making decisions. You learn how to explain something without hiding behind professional jargon. Most importantly, you learn that people do not care how complicated your process is if the result does not solve their problem.

That understanding has strongly influenced how I think about websites.

A business owner is rarely excited because their website uses a fashionable framework. They care that customers understand what the company offers, trust the business and know what to do next.

The technology matters, but it should serve the outcome.

I Learn by Building

My preferred way to learn has always been experimentation.

I can read documentation and watch tutorials, but I understand something properly only after I have tried to use it, broken it, repaired it and eventually figured out why the original approach failed.

That is one reason AI-assisted development immediately made sense to me.

It dramatically shortens the distance between an idea and something concrete. Instead of spending days preparing before you can test a concept, you can begin building it immediately and learn from the result.

This does not remove the need to understand what you are doing. It changes how that understanding develops.

You can ask the AI why it created a certain file, why a layout breaks on mobile or why one implementation is safer than another. You can compare different approaches while the project is still open in front of you. You can experiment with ideas that would previously have required hours of repetitive work before you could even see whether they were worth pursuing.

I consider that an incredible privilege.

The difficult part is learning not to confuse fast output with correct output.

My Relationship With Coding

I am interested in coding, but I am not emotionally attached to manually typing every line.

I care more about whether the product works, whether its structure makes sense and whether I can explain the decisions behind it.

For many website projects, I enjoy working with a relatively simple stack:

• HTML for the content and structure.
• CSS for the visual system and styling.
• JavaScript for interactions and dynamic behaviour.
• Tailwind CSS for responsive layouts and fast structural work.

I can also work with technologies such as React, Next.js, serverless functions, databases, payment systems and APIs when the project genuinely benefits from them.

The important part of that sentence is *when the project genuinely benefits from them*.

I have learned that it is extremely easy to overengineer something, especially when you enjoy experimenting. A simple business website can suddenly have a custom content-management system, complicated authentication and six services talking to each other before the customer has even supplied the homepage text.

Sometimes the professional decision is not to build more.

Sometimes it is to use a booking integration instead of creating a booking system, connect an existing payment provider instead of touching payment details yourself or keep the website static because the business does not need a backend.

Simple does not mean low quality. A well-designed simple system is often more valuable than a technically impressive system nobody wants to maintain.

I Think Vibe Coding Is the Future

Vibe coding is central to what I am building with Nickest.

I believe the role of a developer is changing from somebody who manually produces every line into somebody who directs, reviews and takes responsibility for increasingly automated production.

That does not mean software engineering knowledge becomes worthless. Security, scalability, architecture, testing and documentation become even more important when code can be generated faster than people can properly inspect it.

What changes is where the human value sits.

The valuable person is increasingly the one who can:

• Understand what should actually be built.
• Turn vague ideas into clear requirements.
• Describe layouts and functionality precisely.
• Recognise when generated output is poor.
• Protect the project from unnecessary complexity.
• Test the finished result properly.
• Communicate honestly with the customer.
• Take responsibility for what gets published.

AI can generate an impressive amount of code. It cannot take legal, ethical or professional responsibility for the final product.

That always belongs to the person shipping it.

I Treat Website Design as a Form of Art

I like to think of website creation as a type of practical art form.

There are rules. A navigation should behave like navigation. A button should look clickable. The user should not need to investigate the page like an escape room just to find a phone number.

Within those boundaries, however, there is an enormous amount of room for expression.

Layout, typography, spacing, colour, imagery and motion can create a distinctive atmosphere before the visitor has consciously processed a single sentence.

Vibe coding makes this creative process faster. You can test an asymmetrical hero, replace it with a restrained editorial layout, change the complete colour system and compare the results without manually rebuilding everything from the beginning.

The danger is that AI agents have their own visual comfort zone.

They repeatedly produce the same gradients, oversized rounded cards, floating decorations, glass effects, generic feature grids and vague motivational copy. The result may be technically clean while still feeling as though nobody actually designed it.

A major part of my own learning process has been recognising those patterns and developing ways to prompt against them.

I do not believe an AI-generated website automatically has to become mass-produced garbage. Used properly, AI can enable more experimentation and more personal expression, not less.

The person directing it still needs taste.

I Am Interested in the Business, Not Only the Build

A website has no commercial value merely because it exists.

It needs a customer, audience or purpose.

That is why Nickest is not only about designing attractive pages. I am also interested in finding leads, defining offers, handling sales, controlling project scope and turning a technical skill into an actual source of income.

One idea I often return to is the simple $500 business website.

The offer is not a custom enterprise platform squeezed into an impossible budget. It is a focused static website for a small company that needs to look credible, explain its services and make its contact information easy to find.

There are countless plumbers, barbers, restaurants, consultants, tradespeople and local businesses that do not need complicated software. They need a good landing page, clear communication and a direct path to calling, booking or requesting an offer.

A skilled vibe coder can create that efficiently.

The hard part is often not building the page. It is finding the customer, understanding what they need, setting boundaries and completing the project without turning a small offer into weeks of unpaid work.

I try to approach sales in the same way I approach development: keep it understandable and human.

Talk to people normally. Learn about their situation. Explain what is wrong, what you can improve and why the improvement could matter. Do not hide behind technical language, and do not promise revenue you cannot control.

A website is an investment, but it is not magic.

I Am Not Here to Sell Easy-Money Fantasies

There is a lot of content online built around the idea that one AI tool, business model or daily routine will suddenly create effortless income.

That is not what I want Nickest to become.

I am interested in opportunities, but also in what it realistically takes to use them.

Twenty websites sold for $500 each would produce $10,000 in revenue. The calculation is simple. Finding twenty customers, closing the sales, collecting their materials, building the projects, handling revisions and receiving the payments is the actual work.

Both sides of that equation matter.

I want to share ideas that can genuinely work while being honest about the uncomfortable parts: rejection, poor leads, unclear scope, failed experiments, technical mistakes and days when you spend hours feeling productive without doing anything that creates income.

Experimentation is valuable. So is recognising when it is time to stop polishing and start selling.

Finding a balance between those two modes is something I am still practising myself.

What Nickest Is Becoming

Nickest is being built for people who recognise themselves in some combination of these words:

• Freelancer
• Side hustler
• Vibe coder
• Developer
• Designer
• Entrepreneur
• Remote worker
• Internet experimenter

You do not need to identify professionally with any of them.

You may simply be somebody who wants more control over how and where you work. You may have an idea but no traditional development background. You may already build websites and want a faster workflow. You may be searching for a realistic service you can sell without spending years preparing for it.

Nickest will include practical articles, website projects, prompts, design ideas, business experiments and honest observations from whatever I am currently building.

Some of the website projects will be free to download and develop further. They are intended to be passed to the AI coding agent of your choice, customised and turned into something useful.

I also plan to teach the surrounding process:

• How to learn vibe coding.
• How to recognise common website layouts and components.
• How to avoid generic AI design.
• How to package a simple website offer.
• How to find and qualify potential customers.
• How to define project scope.
• How to communicate with clients.
• How to prepare a project for production.
• How to know when you need more experienced help.

The goal is not merely to help people generate more files.

The goal is to help them ship better work.

What I Know and What I Am Still Learning

I am not presenting myself as somebody who has completed technology and now possesses all of the answers.

I am still studying, experimenting and changing my opinions as I build more projects.

My strongest areas are practical web development, AI-assisted workflows, website planning, visual direction, digital-product ideas and understanding how technical work connects to an offer somebody might actually buy.

I am also increasingly interested in larger technological questions, including AI, automation, digital services and health technology.

There are also areas where I know enough to recognise that the risk is greater than my current competence. Complex cybersecurity, high-risk infrastructure and systems dealing with sensitive information should not be approached with confidence produced entirely by a successful local demo.

One of the most important professional skills is recognising when to involve somebody else.

I would rather admit that a project exceeds my ability than continue pretending until it becomes the customer's problem.

How I Work

My process is usually a combination of structure and controlled chaos.

I like to begin with a clear objective, audience and primary conversion action. After that, I often design quite freely. I test layouts, follow interesting directions and allow the project to develop its own identity.

When the direction becomes clear, I bring the structure back:

• Reusable components.
• Consistent CSS variables.
• Shared typography and spacing.
• Responsive behaviour.
• Clear content hierarchy.
• Working links and interactions.
• Documentation for whoever continues the project.

I do not think creativity and commercial discipline are opposites.

The best result comes from allowing enough freedom to discover something interesting, then applying enough discipline to make it usable, maintainable and deliverable.

A Few Things I Believe

I believe you can learn valuable skills by building before you feel ready.

I believe simple websites remain a legitimate product even while the technology around them becomes more advanced.

I believe AI makes technical creation accessible to a much larger group of people.

I believe that access creates responsibility, not an excuse to ignore quality.

I believe a developer should be able to explain their work in language the customer understands.

I believe familiar design patterns are useful, but blindly repeating them produces lifeless work.

I believe sales is part of freelancing, not an embarrassing activity that happens after the real work.

I believe failed projects are useful when you are honest enough to examine why they failed.

Most of all, I believe experimentation compounds.

Every strange project, failed offer, broken layout and uncomfortable sales call adds something to your ability to recognise what works next time.

Why Follow Nickest?

Follow Nickest if you are interested in building websites, using AI practically, creating online income streams or designing a work life that is less dependent on a traditional office and career path.

I will share what I know, what I am testing and what I learn when something does not work.

There will be useful downloads, practical instructions, business ideas and opinions that may occasionally challenge what traditional developers, designers or online-business creators tell you to believe.

I cannot guarantee that any particular project, offer or method will make you money.

I can guarantee that I will approach the subject as somebody actively trying to make these things work in the real world, not somebody describing entrepreneurship entirely from the safety of a content calendar.

Work With Me

I am available for selected website-development work, customisation, backend integrations and collaborations with people selling websites or building their own digital products.

You can contact me at hello@nickest.com or send me a direct message on social media at @realnickest.

And if you are here mainly to learn, experiment and build something of your own, you are exactly where you should be.