I've been tinkering with software and graphics for 19 years, from hobby projects to corporate, startups and freelance. Best of all is being on a product from the first idea until it has paying customers or daily users.
In short
- A generalist. Product, design, code, infrastructure and how it sells. For the narrow, hardcore parts, I bring in the right people or agents.
- Deep in the code. Object-oriented from PHP through Java to Kotlin, and functional in React and TypeScript, with the data in PostgreSQL.
- DevOps by nature. Infrastructure as code and CI/CD, on bare metal or in the cloud.
- Teams. I have built and led them, and kept writing code the whole time.
- AI agents. Times have changed, and I delegate much of the work to them. It starts with a good brief; what they deliver, tests check against what your business needs.
- Quick to learn. When a product or a collaboration makes sense to me, I pick it up fast and bring that sense into how the work gets done.
The long version is in my CV.
Think it up with you
The part I enjoy most: sitting down with you, finding out what is needed, and shaping it from a prototype into a finished product.
Make it look and feel right
I have an eye for graphics and UI, and a sense for how the whole thing comes across to people: how it looks, how it feels, and whether it makes sense at first sight.
Build a product from the first commit
The first version of your product, end to end: how it looks, how it works, how people pay, and the servers it runs on. Built with Figma, Kotlin, React and PostgreSQL.
Get more done with AI
I work with AI agents every day. What the product has to do is written down in the words of your business, and automated checks hold the agents to it and keep technical debt from piling up. The product keeps growing without a large team.
Run the infrastructure under it
Terraform, Docker Swarm and a pipeline from the commit to production, on your own VMs and bare metal, or on AWS, GCP or Azure. I build on open source where it fits, so you are never locked in to one vendor. Rebuildable from zero, or it isn't done.
Care how it sells
I have followed marketing, advertising and sales for years, so I think about how a product finds its customers, not only how it works. What we can measure, we can improve, so the product measures how people actually use it from day one.
Tidy up first
Every good start is a tidy one: order, rules and processes in place before the work speeds up. It is hard to eat at a messy table.
Rebuild what no longer keeps up
No big-bang rewrite: I replace a system piece by piece, the old and the new side by side, until the migration is done.
Lead the team
Hiring and onboarding, Scrum, salaries and the hard conversations too, without stepping away from the code.
Need someone who has been through this before? Let's talk.