Ten years building production frontends. Right now I'm at Sigma Technology Group consulting for Axis Communications, where on week one I patched a CSRF vulnerability and have since rolled out a permissions/websocket framework, a Playwright + Vitest test pyramid, and the React 19.2 upgrade.
Before that I ran Smakosh LLC full-time for five years, shipping web apps for Parafin, Diagonal, The Landing, Goldfinch, Heron Finance, LinksDAO, Cosmic, June, Formspree and a long tail of seed-to-Series-B startups. At Diagonal I owned the frontend architecture for a unified crypto-payments API: tech-stack decisions, SSR-vs-CSR benchmarks, the testing pyramid, and a landing page + demo app shipped in under a week.
I also build the products I write about. LLM Gateway — my open-source OpenRouter alternative — has crossed 67,000 visitors, 1,100 GitHub stars, $335K in transaction volume, and a SOC 2 Type II attestation in its first year. Starlink Prices, WaifuPixel and Roll Your Own Auth run on the same playbook.
The default stack: Next.js, React 19, TypeScript, the TanStack suite (Query / Router / Start), Tailwind, shadcn/ui, Drizzle, Hono, Vitest, Playwright. I'm fluent in Gatsby and Remix when the brief asks for them, and I've contributed PRs to both Gatsby and Next.js — so when the framework gets in the way, I know where to look.
#What you typically hire me for
- Greenfield Next.js / React product builds, including the boring scaffolding most teams skip: lint, format, pre-commit, CI/CD, testing pyramid, deployment to Vercel.
- Rescuing a frontend that has outgrown its initial architecture — usually a state-management or rendering-strategy problem in disguise.
- Performance and Core Web Vitals work, backed by real Lighthouse / WebPageTest numbers rather than vibes.
- Setting up frontend testing (unit + integration with RTL/Vitest, E2E with Playwright or Cypress) on codebases that have shipped for years without it.
- Code review, hiring loops, and writing the documentation a new engineer can actually onboard from.
If that lines up with what you're working on, send me a note — happy to talk through scope on a first call.