I shipped an AI assistant on my personal site that answers visitor questions about my work, routing across three LLM providers with automatic fallback so a single provider outage never takes it down. AI handled the boilerplate. I described the architecture to a coding agent, set explicit coding rules and conventions to follow and it scaffolded the provider adapters, config, and test skeletons in one pass — what would have been a weekend of manual work took an afternoon. The parts that mattered, I did myself: the provider-routing and failover logic, prompt design with guardrails so the assistant only speaks from verified content, rate limiting, and a full review of every generated line before deploy. The AI wrote code quickly. Deciding what the system should do, where it could fail, and what "correct" meant was mine. The lasting lesson: AI multiplies clear intent. The sharper my specification, the better the output — the skill isn't prompting, it's knowing what to build well enough to say it precisely.

I've spent the last 5+ years building and maintaining production Laravel systems that businesses depend on daily: order lifecycle and dispatch platforms, payment wallets with dual-ledger reconciliation, broadcast notification systems handling six-figure recipient volumes, and multi-tenant SaaS products I took from an empty repo to paying customers.

My day job is technical leadership alongside hands on engineering work. I set architectural direction, run code reviews, keep every system on current Laravel releases, and coach the junior engineers on my team. Alongside that I stay deliberately hands-on, because I believe a lead who can't ship is just a meeting.

The work I enjoy most is the unglamorous kind: making legacy codebases safe to change, designing queues and retries that survive real traffic, and building payment flows where correctness isn't negotiable. I've worked async with distributed teams for my entire career and I write things down by default.

Outside work I write about engineering practice, build AI-assisted development workflows with a review-led process around them, and maintain a private library of reusable tooling for Laravel work. I'm looking for Laravel backend or Laravel-first full-stack roles where production reliability and judgment matter more than following sprint procedures simply for the sake of it.