Engineer, architect, and CTO.
I'm a CTO and software engineer with more than fifteen years building production systems — and the last several leading them. I've taken products from the first commit to millions of users, grown engineering teams to dozens and an organisation to fifty-plus, and shipped across document automation, blockchain, and live video. I still write the code and design the architecture; I just also hire the people, set the standards, and own the budget now.
Fifteen years, end to end
Babage
Leading a tiny, AI-first team building a creator platform from scratch — subscription channels, structured courses, and live streaming with both free and ticketed sessions. By leaning hard on AI in the development loop, a handful of us have shipped quickly: full-stack platform, Stripe billing with creator revenue splits, and a branded channel that funnels audiences to individual creators.
Hummingbird Studio
Frontend architecture (React / Next.js) and infrastructure for a creative studio in the Chinese market — standing up and running servers on Tencent Cloud and AWS China for regional compliance and performance, plus backend optimisation to cut latency.
Live-streaming platform
I co-founded an interactive consumer live-streaming platform and wrote its first line of code. As CTO I owned all of technology — architecture, infrastructure, security, and a multi-million-dollar budget — growing the company to around fifty people with an engineering team of about twelve at its core, first in China, then Taiwan, settling in the Netherlands in 2023. We scaled it to a global audience on a multi-region AWS stack (ECS, WebRTC, Cloudflare), through to an acquisition in 2024.
Case study ↗Laixing Network Technology
Led technology for a blockchain company — a team of around twenty-five building decentralized applications. We launched a decentralized exchange on the TRON blockchain that ranked #1 across all chains several times, and GuildChat, a social mobile app for chatting, sending crypto, and playing on-chain games.
Quadira
Hired as the company's first software developer to build a Document Output Management platform, Advanced-Forms, to replace expensive enterprise software. I built the workflow engine and document converters from scratch (my first C# work), and after we hit product-market fit, grew and led a team of around twelve as technical team lead.
Case study ↗KJ Business Software
My first job out of school: building custom business software — webshops, ERP, CRM, order management — across automotive, catering, manufacturing, and non-profits.
A few things I believe
Build things you can delete
The best abstraction is the one you can throw away without anyone noticing. I optimise for reversibility — clear seams, narrow interfaces, dependencies that point one way.
Boring technology, ambitious outcomes
Known failure modes and deep documentation beat novelty. I reach for a small, reliable default stack and spend my judgement on the actual product.
Own it end to end
Backend, frontend, and the infrastructure underneath — plus the team and the culture. The system and the organisation are two views of the same thing.
Ship the simple thing
Plain language, visible progress, and a bias toward shipping something that works over being clever.
What I'm building
Right now I'm leading engineering at Babage, building a creator platform from scratch with a tiny, AI-first team. Alongside it I take select freelance and fractional-CTO work — on Taipei time, with my availability kept open during European hours — and build small, sharp developer tools in the open under Arjia Labs: a local-first issue tracker for AI agents, a library for prompts and skills, and a one-filesystem-over-everything CLI.