Timeline

How I got here

Roles, builds and the handful of moments that actually changed how I work. Most recent first.

6 entries
  1. 2026NowWork

    Independent

    Shabs.Dev

    Contract full-stack work, mostly product builds and performance rescues. The other half of the week goes into the Learn and Lab sections of this site.

    • Shipped Ledgerline from schema to first paying user in 11 weeks
    • Published 3 teaching tracks and 20 tips
  2. 2025Jan – DecWork

    Lead engineer

    Relaydesk

    Led a three-engineer team building a realtime support inbox. Owned the socket layer, the event ordering model, and the reconnection path.

    • p95 event delivery at ~180ms end to end
    • Grew from 4 to 11 concurrent agents with no architectural change
  3. 2025Q2Work

    Performance contract

    Orchard

    Six weeks fixing a storefront that took nine seconds to become interactive on real customer devices. Left behind a CI performance budget so it would stay fixed.

    • Time to interactive 8.9s → 2.4s
    • JS payload 890KB → 240KB
  4. 2024Mar – JunBuild

    Internal tooling

    Quarry

    Replaced 90 minutes of daily manual reporting with materialised views inside the existing Postgres instance. Retired in 2025 when the company changed reporting tools.

  5. 2024OngoingTurning point

    Started writing things down

    Self-directed

    Began keeping a decision log on every project. It changed how I work more than any tool I adopted that year, and it is where most of the writing on this site comes from.

  6. 2023StartTurning point

    First production system

    Self-taught

    Shipped something people paid for, broke it in public, and learned what a database lock is at the least convenient possible moment.