Available from September, two days a week

I make slow backends fast and fragile ones boring.

Nine years on distributed systems in Go and Postgres. Contract and fractional work for teams that have product-market fit and a database starting to complain.

See what I’ve shipped

Recent work

Ledger rewrite — payments startup, Berlin

Go / Postgres

2025 · 7 months

Moved double-entry accounting off one Postgres table onto partitioned event storage. p99 write latency 840ms → 46ms; month-end close from 9 hours to 20 minutes.

Multi-region failover — logistics SaaS

Terraform / AWS

2024 · 4 months

Designed and drilled active-passive failover across eu-west and us-east. Two real incidents since, both inside the 90-second RTO, neither noticed by customers.

pgqueue

Library

Open source · 2.1k ★

A job queue that is just Postgres — no Redis, no broker, exactly-once by default. In production at around 200 teams that bothered to tell me.

Query budget linter

Ruby

2023 · internal tool

A CI check that fails a pull request when an endpoint’s query count regresses. Killed N+1 regressions in a 400k-line Rails monolith for good.

How I work

Engagements start with a two-week paid audit

I read the code, watch the dashboards, and interview whoever gets paged at night. You get a written findings document with the three things worth fixing, ranked, and an estimate for each. Plenty of clients stop there, and that is a perfectly good outcome.

I write the runbook before I write the code

Anything I build has to be operable by your on-call at 3am without me on the phone. That means the docs, the alerts and the rollback path ship in the same pull request as the feature.

Two days a week, one client at a time

I hold Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I am not available for full-time roles, I do not take equity in place of rate, and I will tell you early if the work is a poor fit.

Rate and terms

£950/day, invoiced monthly, 14-day terms, contracting through my own limited company. UK, EU and US East timezones. I will not sign an agreement that assigns my open-source work.

I make slow backends fast and fragile ones boring.

Recent work

How I work

Elsewhere

Something in your stack gets slower every month