Replacing a backend without stopping 2,600 stores
150 million documents and 1 TB of data migrated in place, across 9,500 terminals. Result: 79% throughput gain and a 216× reduction in query time.
Software architecture · System design
Technical strategy
with a business edge
I work with founders, CTOs & boards through time-boxed engagements focused on architecture, production systems, integration, and technical due diligence.
Typical engagements
Build from architecture to production
A founder needs senior technical leadership to design and deliver an MVP, from architecture to production.
Scale a system in production
A production system starts to break under growth. Performance, security, scalability or infrastructure costs are becoming a problem.
Integrate different systems
Systems built by different organizations or with different technologies need to be integrated and work together.
Establish or evolve the technical organization
A company needs to establish or evolve its technical organization, from architecture and engineering practices to pre-sales and professional services.
Independent assessment
A board, founder or investor needs an independent assessment of technical readiness before making a significant investment or strategic decision.
How I work
I often end up talking to the business. What I produce is a detailed specification: what gets built, in which order, and what is left out of the first version.
The technology I pick is the one that lets the smallest possible team do the most. Fewer technologies means fewer things to keep alive.
AI adoption and architecture
AI is changing how software gets built. I use it as part of the same discipline: specification-driven, test-heavy and focused on continuous refactoring.
A team with specifications and tests gets faster. A team without them produces more code than it can review.
Selected work
2,600stores, zero downtime
Retail · Backend modernization
18microservices, AWS
Mobility & traffic management
Absorbing three national traffic feeds without a single-source model
HERE, TomTom and Radio24, each on a different schema and update cycle, unified into one platform. In production since 2017, more than 99.9% uptime.
9Mcalls / hour, peak
Public sector
Architecture designed while requirements were still moving
The system grew to 400,000 entities and absorbed peak loads of 9 million calls per hour before a wider modular redesign.
3cities, one architecture
Luxury e-commerce
One architecture across three cities
A single shared architecture for a luxury brand across Berlin, Geneva and Shanghai, with local compliance and localization built into the design. It kept teams aligned across time zones.
1API contract, hundreds of clients
Enterprise content
Headless CMS for Content as a Service
A single API contract for Crownpeak while hundreds of clients depended on the same content layer, reusable without forcing each client into bespoke integration.
10years, no rewrite
Open source platform
Ten years of evolution without rewrite
RESTHeart evolved through major upstream changes while preserving a stable product and API. Unisys and Northrop Grumman used it as it grew into a hosted SaaS offering.
Latest writing
Get in touch
Thirty minutes to describe the situation and work out whether I am the right person for it.
After the call, we decide whether the problem is a fit and what the next step should be.