Software Developer
I design and ship entire apps and APIs that stay working in production — clear ownership, sane failure modes, and nothing surprising at 3am.
Who I am
I've spent my career building products end to end — from the backend systems people never notice until something breaks, to the interfaces they use every day. I like the unglamorous work: queues that don't fall over, migrations that don't lose data, APIs that fail predictably, and UIs that hold up under real use.
I move between React/Next.js and Vue on the frontend, and Django, Laravel, and WordPress on the backend, depending on what a project actually needs — and I'd rather ship something boring and correct than something clever and fragile.
+10 years
Building software
9
Teams & products
2
Languages
Toolkit
The tools I reach for most, and the ones I lean on for anything that needs to stay in production for years, not weeks.
Career
2026 · OnTheGoSystems (WPML.org)
Solved problems for the most popular multilingual WordPress plugin, WPML, and its related products. Built new features, fixed bugs, and improved performance for a product used by millions of websites.
Jan 2025 — Dec 2025 · Vinny
Designed and built the backend infrastructure for Vinny, a RV inspection tool for the US market. Built a REST API, database schema, and admin dashboard for managing inspections and users.
Sept 2023 — Dec 2024 · Axis Security
Axis Security is a event security and staff provider company. I built a web application for managing events, staff, and security personnel. The application included a dashboard for event organizers, a mobile app for staff, and a backend API for managing data.
Jan 2023 — Feb 2025 · ForksOverKnives
ForksOverKnives is a plant-based lifestyle company. I built a web application for managing recipes, meal plans, and user accounts. The application included a dashboard for users, a mobile app for meal planning, and a backend API for managing data.
Portfolio
A WordPress backup plugin that copies your database and files into downloadable zip volumes as resumable background jobs that never time out. Export only in 0.1.0, with restore on the roadmap as its own deliberate screen.
A simple, driver-based solution for adding full-text search to your models — for Django, Flask, or any other Python project.
Mailable replaces WordPress's default email delivery by routing all wp_mail() calls through a configurable provider driver (SendGrid, SMTP.com, Mailpit, or any custom driver). A single settings page lets you switch providers, configure credentials, and send test emails — without touching code.
I am currently building a cantoral app that will be a tool for musicians. This is a personal project and is still a work in progress.
Currently shipping
WordPress backups tend to fail the same way. The request dies somewhere in the middle of a large site, and you find out much later, when you need the file that was never written.
So this one does a bounded amount of work per step and writes down where it stopped. The next step resumes from there. Five profiles, archives split into volumes, and a SHA-256 for every one of them.
Writing
Every stage runs against a time budget and hands back a cursor. Getting that right was harder than it sounds — including one invariant that, read literally, produces an infinite queue.
async def doesn't make your code fast by itself. A tour of the FastAPI patterns that actually matter, with the bad version next to the good one.
A driver-based search layer for Django and SQLAlchemy, inspired by Laravel Scout. Add a mixin, and your index stays in sync without polling or manual bookkeeping.
Get in touch
Have a project, a role, or just a question about something I've built? I read every message.
Please feel free to contact me for whatever — a project, a job, I'll be happy to chat :) Reach me at jdavid.gaitan@gmail.com.