I didn’t start in infrastructure. I started in storefronts.
For years my work was Shopify and Liquid: themes, checkout flows, payment and shipping integrations, the everyday work of making a store sell. In 2021 I turned that into my own company.
Mostly, that the storefront is the easy part. What decides whether a store makes money is everything around it: payments that don’t fail at checkout, shipping that shows up, search traffic, a brand people come back to. PetsFirst was the clearest example in my own work. It grew from one city to more than twenty, with 15x order growth in the weeks after launch, and almost none of that came from the parts of the build a visitor would call the website.
But the bigger projects kept hitting the same ceiling. A client would need a custom backend, or a real database, or a mobile app, or a deploy pipeline, and a hosted storefront platform has no answer for those. Each time, I ended up deeper in Node, in databases, in servers.
In January 2024 I sold the Shopify company. The honest version of why: I had stopped being curious about themes and become curious about the systems underneath them. Running an agency around work that no longer held my attention didn’t make sense, so I let it go.
What pulled me in was how different the failure mode is. A bad storefront loses a sale. Bad infrastructure takes the product down at 3 AM with nobody watching. CI/CD, AWS, containers, automated deploys and rollbacks became the work I wanted to be good at, because they’re what keeps a product alive when no one is at the keyboard.
By 2025 I was CTO at Happy Pet Tech, responsible for the architecture and infrastructure of a multi-tenant SaaS running in five countries.
More than I expected. The Shopify years built habits that transfer directly: caring about the user’s experience over the elegance of the build, shipping quickly, and sweating details that seem too small to matter until they cost an order. DevOps uses the same habits one layer down.