I write backend code that other people have to operate. That is the whole job description, and it shapes everything else: the boring choice usually wins, the failure path gets built before the happy path, and anything that runs on a schedule gets a way to tell you it stopped.
What I actually do
Most of my work is one of three shapes.
Systems that move money or stock between other systems. Marketplace integrations, ERP and CRM work, price and stock reconciliation, accounting sync. The interesting part is never the API call. It is what happens when one side is down, when the same event arrives twice, and when a human needs to see why a record is stuck.
Data pipelines that have to finish before the business day starts. Queue-based ingestion, partitioned Postgres, indexes built for the queries that actually run. I have taken a nightly batch that had to be re-run on any single failure and turned it into idempotent work that retries the one piece that broke.
n8n as platform, not as a toy. Self-hosted on the client’s own infrastructure, with SSO, project RBAC, credential rotation, off-site backups with a restore that has been tested, and SLA reporting that flags a degraded workflow before its users do. I publish templates for the operational parts I would otherwise rebuild every time.
More recently that has extended into LLM work, and the same instinct applies: an agent that talks about revenue must fetch the number through a tool, and the raw tool payload must never leave the API boundary.
How I work
I would rather ask one question up front than guess and rebuild. I write down what I learned, both in the repository and here. I hand over a runbook, not a demo.
If something in my code is wrong, tell me and I will fix it. If something in your requirements is wrong, I will tell you before I build it.
Open source
I contribute back to the frameworks I use in production - small, specific fixes for bugs that cost me an afternoon. Merged in Symfony, Laravel, Sylius, WooCommerce, Dolibarr, telegram-bot-sdk and neo4j-symfony. Laravel #58191 and #58580 were approved by Taylor Otwell; the Symfony scheduler fix shipped across four releases.
I also maintain a few small Composer packages and publish n8n templates to the official library.