I started in the server room. Desktops, laptops, printers, the LAN and WAN they sit on, firewall rules, NAS boxes — and real users with real problems on the other end of the phone. That job teaches you something a tutorial can’t: what it actually costs when a system goes down, and how people behave when it does.

Then I taught myself the layer above it. I built WorkforceIQ, a workforce platform now covering 370+ staff across a multi-brand restaurant group — auto-scheduling, six-role RBAC, attendance and leave, WhatsApp notifications, and a FastAPI service that forecasts staffing demand. I designed it and shipped it to production.

These days I also automate live hotel reservation and admin work with the Claude API, and I’m certified by Anthropic in both Claude API development and AI Fluency.

The two halves inform each other more than people expect. Rate limiting an API and writing a firewall rule are the same instinct. Reversible migrations and documented incidents are the same instinct. I build software the way I’d want to support it at 11pm, because I’ve been the person doing that.

What I want next: a team where reliability and shipping both matter.