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
For products and teams that need to move fast.
How I help
I'm your senior technical counterpart. I build and operate software products, and I advise on the technical decisions that have commercial consequences.
A product to build
I have an idea and a budget. I need to know whether it can be built and what I am committing to.
Scale a system in production
I need to know whether the system will hold under real load and what has to change before it breaks.
Before you commit
We are about to commit to something large. We want someone from outside to look at it first.
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 amplifies existing practices and processes: a team with specifications and tests gets faster, a team without them produces more code than it can review.
For architecture it has been less useful than for code. A model proposes what is most common in its training data, and the most common answer usually adds a technology rather than removing one.
Deciding which trade-off a client can live with for the next five years is still a conversation with people.
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.