Fractional or interim CTO
Executive technical leadership by the day or by the quarter: strategy, architecture, hiring and the hard conversations, without a full-time hire until you need one.
CTO-as-a-Service
A CTO when you need one. Clear-eyed about AI.
Fractional, interim or full-time technical leadership for SaaS and platform companies: teams, architecture, cloud, and AI you can actually ship, from someone who still writes code.
- 25+ years building SaaS
- Fractional, interim or full-time
- Cape Town · UTC+2 · remote
What I do
How I work →Three ways to put a CTO in the room
AI strategy and delivery
Where generative AI genuinely pays off in your product and your engineering, where it does not yet, and a plan that ships rather than demos.
Technical due diligence
An honest, readable view of a codebase, a team and a platform for investors, acquirers and boards, then help fixing what matters.
Selected projects
All projects →Still shipping
2022–2026 · CTO
Public Sector Network platform
The community, events, learning and marketplace platform behind Public Sector Network, a free government-only network across Australia, New Zealand and North America. Built from the first commit in 2022 and run end to end as CTO.
2026 · Design, code and launch
Flappycar
A one-button browser game: a sports car on cold-gas thrusters, a daily course everyone shares, and ghost races sent to friends as a URL with no backend at all.
2026 · Design and code
mdread
A very fast, GPU-rendered Markdown reader for Linux and macOS, built in Rust for large high-DPI screens. Ten percent of the features, all of the speed.
Selected writing
All writing →Thinking in public
mdread: a Markdown reader with 10% of the features, built for speed and a 4K screen
I wanted a Markdown reader with 10% of the features of every other reader and editor, as fast as possible, and using all of my 4K screen. So I built one in Rust.
A whole replay in a URL: how Flappycar's ghost links work without a backend server
How Flappycar sends a friend your entire run as a ghost to race, with no backend server: a fixed physics step, a seeded course, and every tap packed into a couple of hundred bytes of URL.
The Gotcha Game That Drives Great Engineers Away
Most tech interviews are a game of gotcha that makes the interviewer feel clever and loses solid builders. The best interviewers are great conversationalists who listen.
How will we train junior developers in a world of generative AI?
Generative AI is delegation, not just abstraction. How do juniors build the judgement to use it well, and what should teams and employers change?
About
Polyglot developer, architect and CTO
Twenty-five years of building SaaS, distributed systems and search in startups and corporates, from MVP to scale. Now a consulting CTO working with founders and boards on technical leadership and AI.
Work with me
Need a CTO in the room?
Fractional, interim or full-time: technical leadership, AI strategy you can actually ship, and honest due diligence. The first conversation is free, and if I can’t help I’ll introduce you to someone who can.
Cape Town · UTC+2 · remote