I'm hired when teams need someone senior enough to make the architectural calls, hands-on enough to ship the code, and around long enough to live with the consequences. That's the role I optimise for. Not "an extra developer for a sprint," not a strategist who never opens an editor, but a principal-level partner who shows up in the codebase and stays in the room.
How I work
I'm opinionated about the boring foundations. Proper REST, proper OAuth, idempotent writes, sandboxes that actually work, SDKs developers can use without reading source: that's where I spend most of my time, because that's where compounding cost lives. Get them wrong and the next two years are expensive; get them right and the team gets a moat almost no platform has.
I run my own work the way I'd run a team's: with structured specs, explicit sign-offs, and gates that fail honestly when something isn't ready. It's how I avoid the freelance failure mode of "ship now, regret later," and it's why my clients tend to keep me around.
How I think
My instincts are architect-first. I look for the simplest model the domain admits, name the primitives clearly, and prefer constraints that make whole categories of bug impossible. I think on long horizons. Most architectural decisions are bets that compound over years, and I'd rather slow down for a week now than spend a year working around a missed call.
I write because writing forces clarity. If you want a sense of how I think, the most recent essay is Verifiable Cooperation, on why the next era of software integration isn't about agents, aggregators, or APIs, but about systems that can prove they agree.
How I show up
Direct, specific, and willing to disagree. If something's wrong I'll tell you, and I'd rather have an awkward conversation early than a worse one later. I treat the relationship as the product as much as the code is. Most of my clients have worked with me for years, not weeks, because the value compounds in the same way good architecture does.
I'm not a contractor and there's no fixed-term contract. I plug in deeply when there's something to do and step back when there isn't, and I aim to leave every codebase materially better than I found it.
Who I work with
Founders and platform leaders at startups, scale-ups, and agencies who want a principal-level partner rather than another set of hands. Most of my work sits in fintech, SaaS, and platforms with serious API surface. Places where the cost of getting the foundations wrong shows up in the next funding round, the next compliance review, or the next partner integration.
If that sounds like you, drop me a line. I respond honestly, usually within a day.
