After leaving Vaha, I decided to try my hand at working for myself with a mix of Shopify App design and other freelance projects. Also I decided to have a short sabbatical to be able to learn new things and to gain clarity on what to do next in my professional career.

Projects I worked on during this time were:

• A full Shopify app for price comparison called Stakeout
  • Stakeout is a price comparison app where a Shopify merchant can select a product that they are selling and our app will fetch the prices of the same or similar product from a variety of sources including google shopping, a localized amazon store and general google search. We then compile a report every day and show it in the merchants dashboard and via an email report.
  • The technologies I used were a Rails 8 backend using hotwire and Stimulus for the Frontend Interactivity. For the Frontend I used the Polaris ViewComponents from Shopify with normal Rails views. The Admin dashboard for the app operator was built using maquina components, Tailwind and Rails views with Turbo and Stimulus
  • Link: Marketing Website
  • Link: Shopify App Listing
• An Agentic system that scrapes google maps results and generates websites for local businesses that dont have a website already
  • A fully agentic ai system that runs on cloudflare infrastructure: workers, D1 Database, R2 File storage. It uses Flue as the agentic harness to automatically build a website tailored to the specific local business with their exact opening times and a selection of their real google reviews integrated into the site.
  • The operators admin dashboard lists all the leads that had websites generated for them, the operator then checks the website for QA purposes and if satisfied, sends a postcard using Lobs api to send the post via USPS. The Postcard is also generated via a similar Flue workflow that uses Anthropics API to generate the text and Cloudflares remote browser to take a screenshot of the small businesses new website
  • The postcard contains a QR code to the preview website, with a banner for the customer to purchase the finished website via Stripe, once purchased the customer can ask for small changes which are also automatically done via Claude through the Flue agentic harness
  • Link: Example preview site
• Built a Whatsapp customer service messaging bot that small businesses could purchase and use to handle automated ai/llm powered conversations.
  • Basically the business owner imports or enters FAQ style questions into the bot and when customers message the business my app uses ai to answer these questions based on the knowledge base.
  • Link: Upwork App listing
  • Link: WhatsApp Rails Chatbot Github Repo

Joined as one of the first backend developers for Vaha Sports Mirror. Greenfield project where we started Vaha from scratch and had to build everything from full backend API for all the Vaha mirrors to a full subscription and billing system, using Rails / Grape / Sidekiq / PostgreSQL. Vaha was eventually acquired in 2022 by Bioniq and we used Vaha's backend as a base for a integrated backend for both companies.

Some of the Projects and Tasks I undertook while working at Vaha were:

• Planned and implemented a complete Billing, Payment and Subscription System with api connections to Shopify and Chargebee.
• Implemented and maintained full messaging stack to contact customers including email, sms, push using Sendgrid, Onesignal and Twilio.
• Implemented and maintained a Backoffice Admin Dashboard using Active Admin.
• In 2022 Vaha was acquired by Bioniq Ltd. In this process I led the program to merge the two companies' backends together especially with regards to creating a full payments and subscription system migration and new setup for Bioniq. This included subscription management and billing using Stripe, Chargebee and Shopify.

In July 2017 I switched roles from a Network Admin to a fulltime Backend Developer at Pixformance Sports. My duties as backend developer included:

• Planned and implemented a Rails 4 to Rails 5 upgrade on a relatively large and complex codebase.
• Designing, implementing and maintaining the Rails based RESTful API.
• Designing and implementing new features for this API which serves Pixformance's various front end clients.

• Migrated a large scale centralized geographically separate Active Directory Domain (1000 computers) to a decentralized fault tolerant fleet being managed exclusively by Puppet.
• Administered and maintained Linux Servers to manage this puppet site.
• Contributed to and helped to maintain a Ruby on Rails Backend System to communicate with these machines.

• Responsible for a large network of 800 computers divided into 2 Active Directory Domains.
• Responsible for the maintenance and support of 8 Servers including 2 Domain Controllers and a SQL Server.

I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science/Information Systems.

I passed the Exams and obtained the competency certificates for the following courses:

• Programming in Java
• Advanced Java
• Enterprise Java Beans
• Object Orientated Analysis and Design using UML
• Distributed Systems via CORBA