I'm a software engineer who got started off my journey in QA breaking systems before I was building them. I still go looking for the edge cases and the failures that only show up under load. These days I mostly build backend systems that need to stay up and develop first-party products that do not share users' data with monopolies or third-parties.

Most of my career has been at startups where mistakes cost real money or real trust:

• Healthcare platforms built to HIPAA requirements
• Financial infrastructure built for SOC 2, where a transaction can't be undone once it goes out
• High-availability services with hard SLAs

Some of what I'm building now:

• Automated trading tools for prediction markets that read breaking news and match it to open markets
• Bitcoin payment integrations and crypto market-data tooling
• Sports data pipelines and APIs
• Developer tooling that turns issue tracker tickets into work for AI coding agents, plus audits and cleanup of AI-generated codebases

I run my own infrastructure wherever it makes sense, and I've built up working knowledge of deployments, server administration, monitoring, hosting and security along the way. For observability and analytics I go self-hosted by default. Your users' data shouldn't be a third party's free lunch.

I build pragmatic solutions for all different problem types. I 💚 Ruby on Rails, but also work in many other code bases ranging from Elixir, Node.js, Python, and beyond. Whatever tool is best for the job is what I'm working in.

I write about architecture decisions, performance problems, background jobs, database migrations and self-hosting at snogrammer.com/blog.

If you need help with a production system (or an AI-written codebase that's fallen over), I take on consulting work.