Fifteen years of shipping
I've spent 15+ years building SaaS products — the front-ends people click, the APIs underneath, the databases, the queues, the billing and auth nobody sees until it breaks. The Code Smith is my studio, and it's deliberately small: one accountable builder rather than a pyramid of hand-offs. When you brief a project here, you're not being routed to a junior team learning on your invoice.
You brief — the person who builds
I run my own products
I don't just build software for clients — I build and operate my own, on exactly the stack I'd put you on. LeadProwl, a lead-data platform. NoMailBounce, an email-verification service. Unbuilt Lab, a startup-idea research app. Plus a library of nineteen live website templates and a self-hosted RAG chatbot. These aren't demos — they're production systems I keep running, which means the advice you get comes from operating scars, not conference slides.
Also — 19 live templates, a self-hosted chatbot
How I build
Hand-written code — no page builders, no bloated themes, no black boxes you can't inspect. I work in Python, FastAPI and Postgres on the backend; React and React Native / Expo on the front; queues and schedulers for the work that runs around the clock; and self-hosted LLM / RAG where AI genuinely earns its keep. The through-line is ownership: I architect things so you end up owning your stack outright — code, docs and credentials — with zero lock-in.
Also — queues, schedulers, self-hosted LLM/RAG
What I write about
Lessons from running the thing.
Everything I publish comes from work that's actually in production — no theory I haven't lived with.
Where LLMs and RAG genuinely pay off, where they quietly don't, and how to keep them factual and grounded once real users arrive.
Turning repetitive work into pipelines that run themselves, and shipping honest MVPs before over-building.
Hand-written code, own-your-stack architecture, honest deliverability, and why lock-in is a choice you don't have to make.