Fortunato Geelhoed

When I started building for the web, "frontend" was where you were put before you'd earned the backend. The reward had a ceiling, so I went full-stack early, and I stayed there.

Twenty-five years later the industry has cycled twice. Frontend became a specialism: the people who could build fast, polished single-page apps were suddenly the ones in demand. Then AI tooling shifted the equation again. The cost of going deep on both ends at once dropped, and the generalists who never stopped writing backend code found themselves with an edge. This site is one piece of that: the same portfolio built three times over, in React, Vue, and Angular, on a single backend I wrote to serve all three. The deeper backend, data, and infrastructure work is on the timeline.

In all those years I've never been handed a problem I couldn't ship my way through. Different stacks, different eras, the same instinct: understand it properly, then build the simplest thing that holds.

I care about code that's correct, tested, and legible. I lean on static analysis and real coverage, and I reach for a pattern when it earns its place, not because a convention insists on it. Elegance, to me, is the absence of cleverness you don't need.

At the places where I wasn't hired as a lead, I was asked to become one. The work I'm proudest of is quieter than that: mentoring engineers, writing decisions down, and leaving teams more capable than I found them.

The career has taken me a long way around. I started out in the Netherlands, moved to New Zealand and kept my clients on from there, then spent eleven years in Australia, first in Brisbane and later in Melbourne, before coming back to Europe. A lot of those years were inside agencies, where you learn to ship fast across wildly different clients and codebases. From there I moved into consulting, and six years ago I went out on my own.

These days I'm on the Costa Blanca in Spain, working through my own company, JiggyBit S.L., with clients across the continent. The travelling was never only about the job. I like experiencing different places and cultures, and this corner of Spain has everything else I value: space, mountains, long views, nature, and sun. Outside client work, I'm usually deep in my own systematic trading system, or fixing up an old Spanish house that needs about as much debugging as the code does.

The timeline has the full story, role by role, and the whole site is open source, so you can read every line.