Sharvano Mangalie was born and raised in Suriname, moved to the Netherlands after high school, spent a decade in enterprise IT, and learned Framer in Mexico City after his wife’s posting took them there and his career stayed behind.

A degree in business, a career in software

The formal qualification is business administration. The actual path started with an internship at a co-working space that housed IT companies, where he drifted into web development and started teaching himself, asking colleagues what the right approach was.

He freelanced in WordPress, then took a traineeship that moved him into low-code enterprise application development on Mendix, working in Scrum and Agile teams for about three and a half years, including projects for the municipality of Rotterdam. He became a product owner, responsible for a Chrome extension that audited Mendix security inside applications.

He enjoys the coincidence that Framer is a Dutch company, and so is Mendix.

Mexico City, and a career left behind

When his wife was posted to Mexico City, he moved with her, which meant dropping the career he had built and, for a while, having nothing to do. Design had always been the thing he was drawn to and never pursued. The course was the excuse to finally chase it.

It just made sense to partake in the course and basically fuel that spark I always had for design.

Why not Webflow, and why not templates

He knew web design from the old way: WordPress, PHP, later Elementor, and always a detour through Figma before anything could be built. He had watched Framer appear and filed it under prototyping rather than development. Webflow came next, and he liked it, up to a point: quite nice, he says, but it has its limitations.

Then the assumption broke. Framer was both halves of the job, so why not just use it.

He started by pulling apart templates to see how the layers were built, which felt immediately familiar — the same nesting logic as Figma, and not far off CSS, which he describes as just boxes inside boxes. But he did not want to stay there.

I’m not really a fan of templates. They can help, but it sometimes feels like cheating in some sense. So knowing how to start a project from scratch was basically one of my goals.

The fundamentals, and what was missing from Mendix

The section that mattered most was the first one. Stacks, and what a parent can control for everything nested inside it, was the piece he had genuinely not understood coming from a low-code background.

The other surprise was motion. Component-based enterprise platforms give you very little room to add anything expressive, so the applications he had spent years building all looked flat. Framer handed him hover effects, transitions and text effects as ordinary features rather than engineering projects.

A tennis club, built on purpose

For his own build he picked something he actually cared about rather than a practice file. He likes tennis, he likes things minimal and luxurious, and he combined the two into a site for an exclusive tennis club.

It went faster than expected, because the foundations were already set and the rest was experimentation, mostly with transitions. He points to a lesson where Ryan duplicates a pre-built section to make the next one, since the layout and structure are already right. In an era where the building is the easy part, he argues, what is left is the creative thought behind the project.

Accountability, not just information

What he keeps returning to is that the course asked something of him. Each section ends in a build-along project he could follow exactly or twist into something of his own, then submit for feedback from the Insert Frame team.

He submitted one and got detailed notes back on breakpoint best practice, which he rated highly enough to also flag the gap it exposed: he wanted more on the purpose of max width and max height. Between that and a Slack channel he describes as constantly active, being stuck stopped being a reason to stop.

The world as his oyster

He is candid that his position is unusual. He is in Mexico City, he can work from anywhere, and he now has a skill set he did not have a year ago. The plan is small projects for people around him, for small businesses, for family and friends, and to see where it leads. He is also considering a master’s in business and IT management, on the theory that carrying several platforms in your backpack is what makes you useful.