Who am I?

I’m a nerd at heart. My teens were spent with Dungeons & Dragons, playing MUDs, programming (Basic, Pascal, Modula 2, C++, websites) doing wargames, reading fantasy and sci-fi and any other classic nerdy activity you can think of. I was also interested in people though and ended up with a masters degree in Cognitive Science focused on Human Factors Engineering before I veered back towards programming.

As a freelance developer I provide a range of services mainly in the JavaScript ecosystem, both frontend and backend and with a deeper specialization in React. I like going deep and really understanding how things work, and I like going broad and thinking about the big picture, so it doesn’t matter if you need long term help forming and executing on a technical vision on a strategic level, or have something quick that needed to be done yesterday on a nitty gritty operational level, I can help. I’m good at learning and adapting and I love teaching, mentoring and being a team enabler just as much as I love a technical challenge.

Bridging the server-client divide, performance, architecture, Node, Next.js, build tooling, testing and frontend DevOps are some of my strengths and I believe great DX is an enabler for great UX. I’m a pragmatic perfectionist and my superpower is finding simple abstractions for complex problems.

Every now and then I do open source or experiment on my own and I’m well known for my expertise in React server rendering, hydration and data fetching. I’m a core contributor to React Query, I’ve fixed bugs in React and Next.js and I’ve been low key but long time involved in Redux. I love going to meetups and conferences and meeting people.

When I do work on OSS it’s mainly an exception though. In my spare time I much prefer hanging out with my wife and kids, spending time in nature, brewing beer, reading or playing video games, usually involving the killing of demons.