What is Jidake?

It all started with me, Yurii Svetlyakov. In high school I've read a book called "4 Hour Work Week" by Tim Ferriss.

I've decided that a regular 9-5 job is not for me, so I've started to look for ways to make money. I've tried to start a couple of businesses, but they failed miserably.

I've bought a 3D printer to print figurines. The cheapest one... The delivery was late, it didn't have some parts and barely worked. Later I figured out that such printers can't even make the figurines I wanted. And worse still, there isn't really a good demand.

I've tried many different things. I've tried to become a freelance 2D, 3D artist. I've researched some neural nets while still in school. I've made some stuff with arduino, showed it to some people. Participated in LEGO robotics competitions. Spent a summer writing a personal app with Android Studio for tracking homework. Made some games for myself and my friends.

I remember going home after school and spending almost all of my time on my dream app, Kanji Quest. After rewriting it almost completely multiple times, I've decided that it's better to puslish at least something than nothing and pushed through. The results were quite pathetic to be honest. You can find it on the home page, it has about 100 downloads right now.

Even before finishing Kanji quest app, me and my friend have made a simple game in a week. It was Foxy: Nightmares. It wasn't an overnight success, but it made about 10$ a month, which was somewhat decent for a broke university student I was. Finally I'm earning while I sleep I thought. I've also made a sequel game but it didn't gather as much attention. To be honest I don't know how we generated traffic, people probably were searching for FNAF and found our game.

And then, I found a job as a full-stack dev. Had to learn angular from zero. I've worked there for 9 months and quit to finish my bachelor's thesis and find something better.

Life doesn't always go as planned and in half a year I've got myself in a pretty bad situation with no money, no job and started a master's degree that was utterly useless. So, I've returned to my previous job with a salary increase. They accepted me quite warmly and I'm very grateful to them for that.

It has been one and a half years since then (I'm writing this in May 2025). I've made a Telegram bot for myself and published a simple game about Mita on Yandex Games.

It's... hard to find time for my projects. And after so many years it's even harder to find the motivation.

However... I don't wanna work a 9-5 job for the rest of my life. I wanna have financial freedom, freedom to travel and have time for things that are important to me.

That's why I can't stop.

And as for the Jidake name itself, it's made from 現実だけ (genjitsu dake) which means "just reality" in Japanese. I took the middle ji and added it to dake. It doesn't really make sense, but it sounds nice and is quite memorable in my opinion.