Stephane D.

If you are building software without a technical co-founder, I can be the technical lead you would otherwise have to hire, and I can also write the code. I have built web and mobile applications for 25 years, and since 2012 I have run Techaround, a 10-15 person development agency in San Diego. You get senior-level decisions, with a team behind them when you need one. As your fractional CTO: ✅ Decide the architecture and the stack, and write down why, so the next developer can follow ✅ Turn what you want into a plan, an estimate and milestones a team can build against ✅ Hire, review and manage developers, including an existing team or freelancers you already pay ✅ Review code and infrastructure, and tell you plainly what is risky and what can wait ✅ Take over a platform from a previous team: get the code into your own accounts, set up CI/CD, and get you back in control ✅ Sit in on investor, partner and vendor calls as the technical voice As your senior developer: ✅ Build MVPs and scale them, web and mobile ✅ Add AI to a product or a workflow: RAG chatbots, AI agents, MCP servers ✅ Finish or fix AI-generated code so it holds up in production ✅ Build complex payment systems: Stripe, Authorize.net, Braintree, installment plans, commissions, refunds Recent examples: ✔️ Recovered a Django platform from a previous development team: new repo in the owner's GitHub account, a CI/CD pipeline, and the environment moved and secured. ✔️ Greenbite, a school lunch ordering platform: we inherited it and now own it end to end. It serves 40 schools and processes over $3M a year. ✔️ CourseCareers, a career training platform: moved it from WordPress to a modern stack in one cutover, and built the installment, discount and referral payment system on Stripe. ✔️ Pharmalink, a pharmacy dispensing platform: worked through what e-prescribing certification and the DEA rules on controlled substances would demand of the data model and timeline before any code was written. ✔️ Tamarac Airport, a municipal airport operations system: turned how city staff ran leases, invoicing and maintenance into something a team could build. ✔️ Projectous, my own project management product, which I have run since 2015. Clients tell me I communicate better than any developer they have worked with. Non-technical founders understand everything I say, and most of my clients have been with me for years. I will tell you when I think a decision is a mistake rather than just go along with it. Domains: EdTech, Healthcare and Pharmacy, Food-Tech, Financial and Lending, GIS and Mapping, IoT, SaaS, E-commerce. Tech: React, Next.js, Vue, Angular, TypeScript, React Native, Flutter, Laravel, PHP, Django, Python, NestJS, Node, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Supabase, WordPress, Shopify, AWS, GCP, Docker, GitHub Actions.