Developer/CTO experience
I have been programming since I was 9 years old and I found the BASIC manual next to the second-hand C128D my parents had bought me (after I got bored of the 100 floppy disk based games it came with).
I went through many languages: Pascal, C, x86 Assembler, Java, PHP, ActionScript, Ruby, Objective C, LISP, Python, JavaScript... after a while they all kind of blend into each other. Yes, each language has its own special flavour that needs to be mastered before one can be truly comfortable with it, but I'm pretty sure at this point I can be competent enough to get things done to a professional level within a day or two with any programming language out there.
My preference is definitely Ruby, with the framework Ruby On Rails, which I've been using since Rails 2.1 in 2008.
I'm pretty sure I can offer some sort of assistance to most projects. At the very least, I should be able to fairly quickly (within a first conversation) evaluate whether and how I can help, and let you know. I have no interest in working on things I won't be any good at. Life's too short.
These days, I tend to make heavy use of Claude Code and occasionally OpenAI Codex to get code written, bringing my very long expertise of software development to bear to guide the AI tools like a team of smart developers. Some More Details.
My sweet spot is evidently web apps, but as you will be able to tell from the list below, my experience is fairly broad. If you'd like to discuss how I could help you, get in touch and let's talk.
Experience (reverse chronological order)
I like to build things with code. So a lot of these are personal projects. Others are projects I did for my own businesses. Others are things I did more professionally... As we travel further back in time, my memory gets more vague...
July 2024-current - Bamboo
Building "Bamboo", an internal CRM with integrated AI technical narrative generation, tax calculation engine, AI-supported document parsing and transcribing, etc, for my business, GrantTree.
Technologies: Ruby on Rails 7.2-8.1, AI integration, Hotwire, BulletTrain, Postgres
Sept 2025-current - HelixKit
HelixKit is an "app kit" to quickly spin up a new app with core capabilities. You can see what it supports here.
Technologies: Ruby on Rails 8, Svelte 5, ShadCN-UI, Inertia-JS, AI Integration, Postgres
Aug 2025-current - Mixplatter
Mixplatter is a vibe-coded (read: messy) tool to sync up to Mixcloud, download the mixes locally (well, to AWS), and serve up a playlist so I can listen to my favourite artists on Mixcloud without going through their god-awful interface.
Technologies: Ruby on Rails 8, Hotwire, Postgres
June 2024-August 2024 - PromptGarage
"PromptGarage" was a tool to help kick the tyres on new LLMs by constructing complex prompts and testing them against multiple models, to be able to quickly human-eval a new model when it comes out. Not maintaining it because most models are basically good enough to pass such tests nowadays.
Technologies: Ruby on Rails 7.2, AI integration, Hotwire, BulletTrain, Postgres
May 2024-July 2024 - YouScripter
"YouScripter", using the newly released Opus 3 and then Chat-GPT 4o to generate Youtube titles, thumbnail ideas and even whole scripts from dictated notes.
Technologies: Ruby on Rails 7.2, AI integration, Hotwire, BulletTrain, Postgres
2022-2023 - NFTMarkets / OpenSea-Dash
I built two versions of this. Basically pulling vast amounts of data from various APIs to run statistical analysis on NFT transactions and create reports that could help predict the direction of the market by looking at the trading volumes of top NFT collections. Involved a lot of data processing, jobs, charts, etc. This also posted the resulting charts to a decent number of Discords.
Technologies: Ruby on Rails 7.0, FusionCharts, Hotwire, Postgresql, NFT APIs, Discord integration, Postgres
2023 - Thwap
A private twitter scraping app I built to try and increase my engagement on Twitter. I even paid the $99/m for a couple of months to see if I could get good results out of it.
Technologies: Ruby on Rails 7.0, Hotwire, Twitter API, Postgres
2017 - DJBooth
A private app that I used to help sort through vast amounts of MP3s to feed my DJ hobby at the time, to enable to listen to, review, sort, and pre-categorise hundreds of new tracks per week.
Technologies: Ruby on Rails 5.0, SQLite
~2016 - Flask microservices
Yes, I fell for this trend as well. As I recall, I ended up building an identity microservice and one more microservice... I can't recall now. This was for my business, GrantTree, to have fun working with my dev team there when I wasn't overwhelmed with CEO duties. Unusually, built in Python+Flask.
Technologies: Python, Flask, Microservices, Postgres
2012-2014 - "Guardian" internal CRM
An internal CRM to manage the key deliverables of the delivery and sales teams in GrantTree. The initial version was in use for several years, before being replaced by a faster version once we had the resources available to assign full time programmers to it. Still, Ruby on Rails enabled me to build a useful tool here while also running the business as CEO.
Technologies: Ruby on Rails (3.2-4.0 I think), MySQL
2007-2010 - Woobius
A document management system for architects. In this case I was the CTO/cofounder of Woobius and, together with one other very capable developer, we built this world-class, award-winning product which failed for commercial reasons (product-market fit but with the wrong market). Along the way we also built another tool called "Woobius Eye", which enabled lightning fast, live real-time on-site collaboration.
Technologies: Ruby on Rails (2.0-3.1), Adobe Flex, ActionScript, AMF (ActionScript Message Format), MySQL
2008-2009 - Flails
I'm still quite proud of this. I took the RubyAMF library[footnote]which helped transform Ruby objects into Adobe Flex's proprietary, binary Action Message Format[/footnote], which was functional but had some bugs/inaccuracies, and was quite slow, observed how PyAMF did it better, and then optimised the crap out of it. The main benefits were correctness of implementation and speed. On both those metrics Flails beat RubyAMF hands down.
Technologies: Ruby, Action Message Format
2008 - Peeves
Back in the days of yore, long before Stripe came on the scene, there was already ActiveMerchant, thanks to Spotify. Alas, ActiveMerchant didn't support Protx, the payment provider that Woobius used. So we built and released an ActiveMerchant expansion that would support it.
Technologies: Ruby on Rails
2006-2007 - Vocalix/VocalixDirect
Before Woobius, I started another business, where I was also the CTO. It enabled voice/audio to be integrated on websites. The business failed for a variety of reasons, but the product worked well enough.
Technologies: PHP, jQuery, MySQL
2003-2007 - Accenture projects
Before starting my own businesses, I built a variety of projects at UBS (the investment bank), while working for Accenture. Mostly they used Java and I hope never to have to write Java code again. But I did get exposure to the entire development lifecycle from multiple angles, as I also variously took roles as QA lead, project manager, and god knows what other nonsense role was dreamed up back then in that glorious mess that is an investment bank's font office IT department.
Technologies: Java[footnote]Please don't hurt me[/footnote], SQL Server
1998-2003 - Various PHP projects
I built a variety of websites and web apps in PHP during that period. Most are best forgotten. Among others, at one point I built a chemical spot auction website we pitched to a large chemical company (in 2001), designed an HR system for a large Tobacco company, and various project management modules for a web agency.
Technologies: PHP, MySQL
1994 - Raycasting Engine
I... didn't have that many friends back in my teens, so when I was 14, I went and basically did what I now retroactively evaluate as a grad thesis level project. Essentially, I used this book to teach me how to write a Raycasting engine in C. It ran ok but quite slowly on my 486 DX4 with "turbo" on at 100 Mhz. I wanted it to do better. So then I also learned a whole pile of clever tricks from this book to go from Mode 13h to Mode X, unbundle loops in assembly, set up lookup tables, and apply a whole plethora of optimisation tricks to get the Raycasting engine to run smoothly when Turbo was off and the 486 was only running at 25Mhz. It was an absolute delight, loads of fun, and I wish I still had the codebase.
Technologies: C, x86 Assembler
If you've read this far...
Hopefully it's clear that I've had exposure to a fairly broad range of technologies over my time, and I've had a very long-running passion for building software, aka making computers do stuff for me.
I also have a clear focus on web applications. This is not to say I can't get into other specialty areas, and that might be quite fun, but if you're looking to hire me at subcontractor rates, you probably want me efficient from day one. So then the obvious thing will be to use me on a Rails project.
With the benefit of Claude Code, in my favourite environment of Rails, I believe I can likely out-perform most small teams (and some larger teams) of developers in terms of feature velocity. I'm also excessively good at fixing obscure bugs, once I get to know the codebase.
I am limited to 20h/week of availability at the moment, but I can get a lot done in that time.
If this sounds of interest, please get in touch.