I have been contracting through Hidden Bridge since 2018. Before that I ran a games studio for twelve years and worked in-house at a San Francisco startup. The shape of “ownership” is different in each context, but clients hire me for the same thing: someone who can take a poorly defined technical problem and deliver working software without needing a team around them.
End-to-end, not handoff
I do not take architecture-only engagements. I will write the design doc, but I will also write the code, run the profiler, fix the CI job, and sit in the standup if that is what unblocks delivery.
That is not heroics. It is how you learn whether the architecture actually works.
Specialise, do not generalise
My CV spans games, graphics, backends, mobile, and Web3. I do not pitch myself as “full stack everything.” I pitch the intersection of problems I have solved repeatedly:
- Engine and graphics performance (C++, Unreal, Vulkan, WebGL)
- Distributed backends (Golang, NATS, Redis, DuckDB)
- Legacy codebases that need to ship again (Objective-C, C#, mixed stacks)
If your problem is outside that, I will say so early.
Documentation as deliverable
Every engagement produces something the client keeps after I leave: a case study-shaped writeup, a decision log, or a profiling playbook. Not because I enjoy writing for its own sake, but because the next engineer (or the next contractor) should not start from zero.
That is what the Projects and Decisions sections of this site are for.