I'm a generalist. I go deep, just not in one direction.

In high school I was the guy who could make things with computers. I built an app, people actually used it, and I liked the whole loop: understand a problem, design a flow, build, ship.

Computer engineering was the obvious next step. On paper it was perfect. In real life it was theory, exams, and not enough real problems. I dropped out. It wasn't a clever pivot. It was a dark patch, and it taught me that I don't work well when the goal is passing the exam instead of solving something real.

I shifted into economics and international management, then business. Erasmus in the Netherlands, a year at Berkeley. Berkeley was the first place I saw people treating ideas like experiments: try something, ship it, change your mind.

After that I went into management consulting at a large bank. It was the respectable option, with a good salary, big projects, and a close look at payments and at how large organisations actually move. It also meant twelve-hour days and a lot of energy spent on process that didn't fix the work underneath. I wasn't there to genuinely fix the system. I left.

Now

Small companies have the same problems the bank had, with fewer zeros, and unlike a bank they can actually change. That's where I work now. I sit with the owner and map how orders, invoices, or tenders move through the company. Then I automate whatever doesn't need a person.

If a role is built around one narrow specialty, I'm probably not the right fit. I do my best work when a problem crosses product, operations, and engineering, and someone needs to understand how the whole thing connects.

The part I enjoy most is working out what a client actually needs, which is rarely the thing they first ask for. Automation only works if there's a platform the rest of their tools can plug into, and that gets tricky when half of those tools are closed enterprise systems. So I spend a lot of time finding the right balance, and I try to choose things that will still make sense when the company has grown. The concrete projects are on the work page.

Along the way I'm trying to automate myself too, an old functional analyst turning into a software architect. If any of this sounds like your company, write me.