This is the part a CV would list. Here’s what’s actually worth knowing: five things I’ve done that you might need doing.
Dates and names at the bottom, if you want them.
I've been the entire engineering department.
Two products, one engineer: a web learning platform and the iOS and Android apps beside it, 4,000+ users, live the whole time I worked on them. All of it was mine: the Rails backend, the native wrappers, Stripe subscriptions and the discount engine, the AI pipelines that took half the admin load off a support team, and the tests, the CI and the bug tracking that weren’t there before I arrived. Nobody to escalate to. Which is, more or less, the job this site is offering.
Full-Stack Engineer, the only one · wellness products · 2024 – 2026
I've grown one product into a platform.
A home-services booking platform out of Singapore, with thousands of users and between one and ten thousand sessions a month. I led the team that turned a single-service booking engine into a multi-tenant one, which is the thing that let the business open new service lines at all. Along the way: a wallet that had to survive partial refunds without ever losing a cent, and a contact centre that pulled WhatsApp and email into one queue and put the right person on the end of it.
Full-Stack Engineer · home services · 2022 – 2024
I've been the one called in after it broke.
I joined a product after it launched, when it was unstable and the production issues were stacking up: notifications not arriving, bookings failing halfway through. Six months of finding what was actually wrong: the slow queries, the module nobody wanted to open. Not a rewrite. A rewrite is how you get the same story again in two years.
Senior Backend Developer · 2021 – 2022
I've led the engineers, not just been one.
Head of a team of five on a point-of-sale platform used by 80+ aesthetic clinics. One system, and every client wanted their own version of it, so the actual job was letting them have that without the whole thing going unstable for everyone else. I owned the delivery end to end: onboarding a new clinic, shipping the features, and whatever happened in production at the weekend.
Head of Programmers · B2B SaaS · 2020 – 2021
I've built the system a business runs on.
A property developer was doing it all by hand: several departments, two subsidiaries, no single place the numbers lived. I was the founding engineer on the ERP that replaced that: quotations through to invoices, purchase orders through to receiving, journal entries through to a balance sheet. Twenty-odd modules that all had to agree with each other. It became the thing a hundred-plus people opened every morning.
Lead Programmer · real estate & land development · 2018 – 2020
The list
Where and when
Same nine years, in the order a CV would put them.
The first one is where the habit came from: document control systems, a hospital’s operational system, and a lot of sitting in a client’s meeting room turning what they said into what to build.
Since someone always asks
The tools
This is the least interesting thing on the page and it changes every couple of years. It’s here so you don’t have to ask.
Back end
Ruby on Rails
Go
Node.js
Laravel
PostgreSQL
MySQL
Redis
Front end & mobile
TypeScript
React
Vue
Hotwire
Tailwind
Swift
Kotlin
Where it runs
AWS
Heroku
Docker
GitHub Actions
Linux
The specific ones
Stripe
OpenAI & Claude APIs
Performance tuning
You shouldn't have to care about any of it. That's rather the point.
Enough about me
None of this is what I'm selling.
What I'm selling is that somebody else's business ran on it.
And that I was the one who got the call when it didn't.