Case studies
The problem, what I did, and what changed.
Steadying a YC startup’s platform
The problem
A fast-growing marketplace with a non-technical founding CTO. The app leaked memory, crashed periodically, and slowed down under load.
What I did
- Advised the CTO directly on architecture, infrastructure and engineering practice.
- Replaced WebSockets that were being used like a REST API with real HTTP, which stopped the memory leaks.
- Moved slow third-party calls out of request handlers and onto queues.
- Migrated off unsupported RethinkDB to Postgres, ending the crashes.
- Led the move to TypeScript, linting and tracing (New Relic, Sentry).
What changed
A stable, faster platform, fewer bugs shipped, and a CTO who could run it alone afterwards.
Need something similar? Turnaround and fractional CTO
Finding experts from what they’ve built
The problem
A recruiting firm specializing in functional programmers needed to find rare engineers who weren’t on job boards.
What I did
- Found engineers through public GitHub commits in the target languages.
- Validated contact details and matched each engineer to their professional profile.
- Indexed the results in Elasticsearch so recruiters could search them.
What changed
Recruiters could search by what someone had actually built, not by self-reported keywords. It’s the same identity matching and enrichment today’s AI recruiting tools are built on.
Need something similar? Data and AI pipelines
Search for 2 million visitors a month
The problem
A new booking and rewards platform for cosmetic treatment providers had no real search, and a federated GraphQL schema with no shared standards.
What I did
- Convinced leadership to adopt Elasticsearch instead of Postgres: provider taxonomies were bigger than Postgres could search comfortably. Introduced it to the organization and built its first search service.
- Architected the core Provider service in Go, with geolocation, email automation and secure image handling.
- Co-founded the GraphQL Council, which reviews every schema change across 20+ services. Federation at that scale needs decision makers, and they should be democratic, so the best experience is at the table.
What changed
The service became the primary search on alle.com, with over 2 million monthly visitors.
Need something similar? Architecture review
Accurate natural language to execution
The problem
Operators of a smart district, proven at the Honda Center, needed answers from a federated data platform without writing queries.
What I did
- Built RAG pipelines that turn questions like “How many tickets were sold last game?” into valid GraphQL queries.
- Built semantic search (vectors plus reranking) and a Lucene query builder over platform data.
- Put a Go proxy in front of the LLM tooling to enforce the platform’s attribute-based access control.
What changed
Plain-language answers that respect who is allowed to see what.
Need something similar? Architecture review