What I bring
Senior engineer who's been around the block: twenty years writing production Ruby/Rails and JavaScript across startups, agencies, and a London consultancy I founded and ran for seven years. Sendai-based and bilingual, most useful when shipping software, mentoring teammates, or doing both at once.
Stack & tools
Ruby · Rails · JavaScript / TypeScript · React · Node · PostgreSQL · Redis · Linux · Docker · AWS · CI/CD
Key strengths
End-to-end Ruby on Rails for over a decade
From the affiliate platform at Webgains and high-traffic e-commerce at MOO to 30+ projects shipped through Happy Bear and my freelance practice. Comfortable owning a Rails system top to bottom — schema design, performance work, background jobs, deploy pipelines, the lot. [Add a specific concrete example here if there's a project you want to anchor on.]
Mentoring & growing engineers
Hired and trained multiple apprentices at Happy Bear from raw beginners through to senior engineers our clients paid full rate for. Coached working developers in SQL and advanced PostgreSQL for Skiller Whale, and have been teaching in some form — classroom, codebase, or guided tour — for twenty years.
Distributed-team operator
Ran the remote Happy Bear team across every continent (except the polar ones) for seven years, including the written technical and communication processes that kept quality consistent. Now operating hybrid between Sendai and a Tokyo product company.
Cross-functional across languages and cultures
Bilingual English / Japanese, in Japan on and off since 2006 (JET Programme, Iwate). Worked client-facing in London and Tokyo across agency, startup, consultancy and product contexts — comfortable translating engineering details into business decisions, in either direction or either language.
How I approach engineering & teams
Stay on the keyboard
A senior engineer who still ships code keeps their judgement sharp.
Mentor on purpose
Teaching is how teams scale, not a side task you squeeze in.
Ship, then improve
Working software in production beats perfect designs in slides.
Read before rewriting
Every weird line of code had a reason once. Find it before tearing it out.
Write things down
Clear writing is the highest-leverage skill on a distributed team.
Stay curious about the boring bits
Tools change every five years; the habit of wondering doesn't.