What I do.

Tech lead and fractional-CTO engagements where a small team or early company needs senior shape rather than a hire. Architecture decisions, code review culture, deploy and testing practices, and the day-to-day of unblocking other engineers. As a fractional CTO, this also covers vendor selection, technical hiring input, roadmap-vs-resource conversations with the founder / business side, and being the technical face for clients or investors when needed. Most useful in 3-6 month engagements where there’s a real product direction and a team that wants to ship cleanly.

End-to-end marketing and content sites — design, build, deploy, hosting. Astro by default for static / mostly-static sites, Next.js when there’s enough interactivity to warrant it. Comfortable owning the whole pipeline: domain + DNS + SSL, CDN, CMS wiring if needed, analytics. Sites that load fast, score well on Lighthouse, and stay cheap to run.

Full SaaS web applications — auth, billing, multi-tenant data, and the user-facing surface that sits on top. React + TypeScript by default; Next.js or Astro depending on fit. Component-driven architecture, clean state boundaries, real accessibility, and performance budgets that get measured rather than guessed at. Greenfield SPA / SSR builds and rescue work on existing apps both.

End-to-end React Native and Expo work. Comfortable with both new app builds and enhancements to existing codebases. Done several white-label apps where one codebase branches into multiple branded deliverables — I know the patterns and the gotchas. iOS and Android both, plus the back-office work (CI builds, store releases, crash-reporting) that ships them.

Two related practices.

AI work — retrieval-augmented generation pipelines (FastAPI + Postgres + pgvector + OpenAI / local embeddings), LLM-feature integration into existing apps, prompt design, evaluation harnesses, and the operational glue around it: caching strategies, cost control, fallback behaviour when a model is wrong.

Automation — workflow automation, scheduled jobs, internal tools, scripts that take a recurring manual task and make it a Cron entry instead. Often the highest-ROI work in a small business — boring relative to AI, just as impactful.

Backend work as a paired offering with the frontend, or stand-alone. Node + TypeScript, Fastify or Express, REST and GraphQL APIs, Postgres or MongoDB. Comfortable with the boring necessary parts — auth, payments, transactional email, deploy pipelines — that make a product actually usable rather than just demoable.

The catch-all bucket. Anything technical that doesn’t slot cleanly into one of the lines above.

Common examples:

• Framework migrations — Gatsby → Next.js → Astro is one route I’ve done end-to-end on multiple sites. There’s a longer write-up on the blog.
• Legacy code rescue — comfortable inheriting WordPress / PHP / Java codebases that need modernisation, or stuck React projects that need a senior eye to identify the real bottleneck (it’s almost never the thing the team thinks it is).
• Performance investigations — slow page loads, slow database queries, mystery memory growth, intermittent CI failures. Diagnose first, fix second.
• One-off integrations — wiring up a payment provider, a webhook flow, a third-party API your team doesn’t have time to read the docs for.
• Anything else technical — if you’ve got something engineering- shaped that doesn’t quite fit the other service lines, ask.