Feb 2023 —Present
Architect & Lead Developer
- Designed and operate an EKS cluster provisioned with Terraform (VPC, IRSA, autoscaling node groups, EBS/EFS CSI, ALB controller, External Secrets), with every workload delivered through ArgoCD GitOps and Argo Rollouts.
- Author in-house Helm charts for Magento 2, WordPress and internal services, and self-host the company's internal toolchain in place of paid SaaS — analytics (ClickHouse, Metabase), data ingestion (Airbyte), workflow automation (n8n), wiki (Outline), around 20 applications in total. Each was chosen after trialling the alternatives on the cluster; custom code is reserved for what is specific to the business.
- Built the analytics platform — Metabase, picked after a week comparing Superset, Grafana, Redash and others on real data — a warehouse that pulls the whole business into one place: Airbyte pipelines from Google Analytics and Search Console, Meta Ads, Stripe and Bókun, plus MySQL-to-ClickHouse CDC replication of the store itself, reported on through Metabase dashboards used daily by sales, operations and finance.
- Turned Magento 2 — a platform built to sell physical and digital goods — into a genuine booking system, through ~180 in-house modules: a tour product model (departures, itineraries, accommodation, activities, pickup points, price categories) with its own admin UI, date-based availability with waiting lists, and passenger lists with group-leader management.
- Built the commerce edges around it: Stripe and OP Bank payment flows with online refunds and back-office payments, template-driven bulk generation of a whole season's products, order automation, and the GraphQL layer the storefront consumes.
- Rebuilt that storefront as a headless React SSR frontend on the Magento 2 GraphQL API (TypeScript, Vite, Node/Express).
- Building and self-hosting the platform rather than licensing managed products saves an estimated €100–150k a year — most of it Adobe Commerce or Shopify Plus at this sales volume, the rest a commercial BI suite such as Tableau and per-seat SaaS for the wiki, automation and data tooling.
- Carry the platform through season openings, when most of a year's bookings arrive within a few days — autoscaling on EKS, blue-green releases that never pause sales, and New Relic APM across backend traces, logs and browser-side performance.
- Built List Builder, the internal operations tool (Laravel, React, Inertia, TypeScript) that replaced the spreadsheet workflow for assigning travellers to buses, ferries and hotels.