From PHP Courses to a Product of His Own: The Path of Backend Developer Sergei Vertepov

The Tonation service does not hold user funds. A donation goes straight to the streamer's wallet, minus a small commission. That decision shaped the entire product.

Sergei Vertepov founded Tonation in May 2024 and is also the project's lead developer. The first working release came out roughly three months after the idea, and in January 2026 the project received a grant under the ston.fi program.

Before his own product, Vertepov spent three years teaching PHP courses at Netology and running open lessons about the programming profession. He has been doing backend development for more than ten years.

We spoke about how teaching changes an engineer and what lies behind the decision not to hold other people's money.

— Sergei, hello. Let's start with the product. What does Tonation do?

— Hello. The streamer adds a link to the channel description. A viewer follows it and sends an amount and a message. The message appears on the stream: the sender's nickname, the amount, the chosen currency, and the text itself. The text is also read out loud.

There are two jobs here. The streamer gets an additional revenue channel. The viewer gets a way to reach the streamer directly and see the reaction.

— Donation services have been around for a long time. Why was another one needed?

— The difference is the currency. The well-known services work with ordinary money. We work with cryptocurrency, and that changes both the audience and the technical side.

— You say the service does not hold user funds. Why does that decision matter?

— Because it removes an entire class of problems from the product.

When a service keeps money on its side, it becomes a vault. A vault has to be protected, and you have to answer for it to the user. Meanwhile the streamer waits for a withdrawal and depends on our payout schedule.

We arranged it differently. The donation goes to the streamer's wallet immediately. We withhold a small commission, and at that point our role in the movement of money ends. The streamer can use those funds the moment they arrive.

We made the decision at the start, and it shaped the whole architecture.

— About three months passed from the idea to the first working release. How did you manage to fit into that time?

— By dropping everything unnecessary. We have no fund storage, which means none of the work that surrounds it. We narrowed the boundaries of the product in advance, and that gave us speed.

— And all of it alongside your main job.

— Yes. That is almost always how a first project of your own gets built.

— The idea and most of the work on the project are yours. How does a founder's work differ from the work of a hired developer?

— The horizon. A hired developer closes a task and moves on to the next one. A founder is responsible for whether anyone will use the product of that task at all.

And work appears that a developer does not have: gathering people, reaching agreement with them, explaining why all of this is being done. In weeks like that, the code takes a back seat.

— In January the project received a grant. What did it give you?

— Money and media support. For a small project the second matters more than the first: the service was described to an audience we would have reached on our own only much later.

— You taught courses at Netology for three years. What did the job involve?

— PHP courses. Separately I recorded a video course on markup: people watched it as a recording, I never taught it live. Plus the open lessons called "How to Become a Programmer". There I explained what the profession actually is to people who knew nothing about it.

I also reviewed homework and graduation projects. That is a separate part of the job that people usually do not think about: you have to assess someone else's result and explain the assessment so that the person understands what to do next.

I ran more open lessons than any other teacher at the school, and I was recognized for it.

— Was there a lot of public speaking?

— You could put it that way. At the school I was more of a public speaker: open lessons and public events. Separately, I published technical material for a professional audience.

— What did teaching give you as an engineer?

— The ability to explain decisions.

When you describe the profession to someone who knows nothing about it, there is no shared vocabulary to lean on. You have to take every concept apart from the very beginning. After three years of that practice, explaining an architectural decision to a colleague became easy for me.

Reviewing other people's work gave me something else. You look at a solution you would have built differently, and you have to work out whether it works or not. That helps in code review and in hiring.

I will say something separately about people. I came into the profession through courses myself. Several people came into it through me, and I know that for certain.

— Let's go back to the product. Cryptocurrency is still a subject for a narrow circle. How does that fit with the idea of a product for an ordinary person?

— The user is not required to understand how the payment works. They send an amount and a message, and the message appears on the stream. Everything else belongs to our job.

Cryptocurrency here is a way of delivering money. The less a person thinks about it, the better the product has been built.

— Which product do you consider worth building?

— I have two conditions, and they are simple.

An ordinary person should be able to use the product. Someone who opened the app and solved their own problem, without professional training and without reading documentation.

And the product should generate income. A project without money lives exactly as long as the founder has free time, and it ends when that time runs out.

Combining the two conditions is harder than it looks. Products for business pay better and require fewer explanations. With products for people it is the other way around: they have to be made understandable, and that costs more. In exchange, they stay with a person longer.

At Tonation we are trying to hit both conditions at once. The streamer gets money, the viewer gets a conversation, and the service lives on the commission.

He Entered the Profession Through Courses and Brought Others In

Vertepov got into development through programming courses. Several years later he was teaching such courses himself, and in open lessons he explained the profession to people who knew nothing about it. He ran more of those lessons than any other teacher at the school, and several people entered the profession after attending them.

This is how an industry with no formal entry point reproduces itself. A university degree is not required here, and the chain holds together because of people who are willing to spend time explaining.

He launched his own product two years after leaving the school. It follows the same logic: the developer is the one who has to understand things. A person who simply wants to support a streamer needs to know nothing.