Between 2020 and 2022 I had to shut down a company that, by rights, should have exited. It should have exited big enough that I'd be on a yacht right now. I don't know what I'd have named the yacht—but I'd be on one.
Instead, I took a long, hard look at all the tech and all the code I'd built: the choices, the shortcuts, the cleverness, the things that made the company work for a while—and then didn't.
I sat at a whiteboard during a GitHub conference, in the back of a San Francisco office, and we tore the structure apart. Over the next several weeks—and the months that followed—we kept pulling threads until it was obvious how much we'd built that had felt sensible at the time and simply hadn't held up.
Low Code CTO started as a joke. How could a name like that even make sense?
It stuck because it turned into a kind of mission: use the right amount of stack—the smallest, the least, the most purpose-built thing that actually fits—so founders ship what makes the mission work, tick, and run fast. Not what the developer in the room wants to build for its own sake.
That's the through-line for how I work now. If you want the tool-level version of this story, start with the cookbook . If you want to talk about your stack and your constraints, Work with me? .