FoundFast & ManyRoads

At Talent Co-Op, a tech worker co-operative that builds talent across Asia and Africa, I led a distributed team from Accra for clients in Hong Kong. The job was two things at once: keep a team of about ten engineers shipping predictably, and build the Python backends, APIs and a good part of the mobile apps myself.

FoundFast

FoundFast runs monthly startup-idea competitions: people submit ideas, the community votes, finalists advance and prizes are awarded, in English and Chinese. It launched in September 2023 as part of Hong Kong's youth festival, designed and developed by the Talent Co-Op team. I was the lead engineer on the Django backend and wrote most of the Flutter app, then shipped it to the App Store and Google Play, where it passed three thousand downloads.

ManyRoads

ManyRoads turns curated routes through a city's points of interest into immersive, GPS-guided storytelling journeys, with audio tailored to the listener's language and interests and location-based checkpoints along the way. I led the Flutter app and was the main contributor to the Django backend. The interesting problems were geospatial checkpoints, progress state, and user-generated routes that have to stay consistent across devices.

How the team shipped

Thirty-plus releases a year across web and mobile does not happen by enthusiasm. I introduced automated testing with Pytest and CI/CD on GitHub Actions and CircleCI, ran architecture reviews and sprint execution, and mentored engineers on design, debugging and test-driven development. The goal was a team that could explain why the system was shaped the way it was, not just add to it.