Consultant CTO

I started off as a junior developer (actually I started off as a self employed window cleaner, but thats a different story). As I worked in more and more varied and diverse scenarios in the tech & online world, I gathered a substantial number of practical experiences working in different teams in different settings. From working on small websites alone, or with a couple of other people, to fully fledged agile departments (with 5 or more individual teams all working on the same codebase) building out existing commercial applications, to cofounding small teams and engineering the tech stack myself from the ground up enabling the client to go from inception to getting a second round of funding in the tens of millions.

Website development

Over the course of my career I have designed and built websites for myself and private customers, distinct from web apps in that websites aren’t dynamic (eg backed by a datastore) and are mostly built for promotional or information puropses. The skills and thought process involved is very different from software architecture or building a web application. I started out designing and crafting handwritten HTML and CSS but the tooling now is far more advanced than when I started, which is nice and makes it very easy to build very nice websites!

Web app development

As a contractor I made a career out of building apps out of open source software, such as Ruby on Rails, PHP, various Javascript flavours. Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to work with many of these technologies in commercial ventures.

Developer mentoring

As a software developer, making a career out of building on open or closed source technology can be challenging. There is so much out there, so much seems contradictory. Technologies get popular, gather mindshare, fade away, make a comeback. For junior developers it can be challenging to know how to to be effective in a team, I know, I’ve been there. Knowing what are the right tools or strategy for a project or task very often takes a good deal of experience and knowing what the tradeoffs are (and there always are tradeoffs!) can be daunting.

Here’s my CV!