Kevin Smith
Independent Full-Stack Engineer
Summary
- TypeScript/Node, Postgres, Python, WordPress. Agent-driven delivery with guardrails, cost measurement and output verification.
- 24 years building for high-traffic publishing and financial services platforms (TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Django, WordPress).
- Director-level experience, chose the IC path. Led teams of up to 16, built systems that generated $100M+ in revenue.
- Independent consultancy shipping 20+ production web applications, among them whoami, reductio, priors, mileweave, verbatim and incognita (centricle.com).
Experience
Independent web development consultancy, est. 2023. Agent-driven, not agent-trusted: guardrail hooks block the known failure modes before they land, every run is metered, and output is verified against its source before it ships.
Contract engagement: Stock chart automation tool for a financial publishing group. React 19 + TypeScript panel running inside Adobe Illustrator (CEP) that renders charts as SVG and places them as editable vector art through ExtendScript, with a Node/Express API (structured extraction via the OpenAI API) and Python parsing service. Built style templates with per-chart overrides stored as diffs, undo/redo and a signed, notarized macOS installer. Sole engineer across 13 releases in 10 weeks, behind a release gate that checks the shipping artifact. Took over production operations on AWS. (Jun 2026 – Present)
Contract engagement: Custom WordPress development for 247wallst.com (Flywheel Publishing), a high-traffic financial news site. Primary developer on the theme rebuild (464 of 930 commits): theme architecture, versioned live-blog templates, real-time stock chart integration, Core Web Vitals and accessibility work. (May – Nov 2025)
Products: 20+ production web applications as sole developer. Full-stack apps with auth, payments (Stripe) and Postgres (Neon): database-backed apps migrated to Neon in 2026 with hand-rolled auth and transactional email. Content platforms with SEO architecture (Astro, TypeScript). Browser extensions.
- whoami.fyi Search collision detector. Free preview, $3 Claude-run audit behind Stripe checkout.
- reductio.us Assessments graded against primary sources. Seven modules, 471 citations verified at the evidence level.
- priors Open experiment on model defaults at centricle.com/curios/priors. Four Claude models, 18 tasks, 6,400 trials.
- mileweave.us Road trip planner in production. Auth, Stripe subscription, Postgres, Claude API.
- verbatim.fyi Primary-source data explorer. Five public datasets, one interface, zero editorial.
- incognita Shared world that exists only while someone is looking. Node, WebSockets, scale-to-zero Fly machine, no database.
- thehelm.fyi Open-source fleet dashboard. Express, EJS, HTMX. MIT, with a live demo.
- invoisaurus Open-source invoice generator on github.com/centricle, release 2.2.0. Web UI in, PDF out.
Marketing engineering for a SaaS PR platform. Owned the public-facing marketing site and lead generation systems on Wagtail CMS (Django), shipping landing pages, content templates and lead capture workflows.
Site-wide redesign on the Fool’s custom Wagtail CMS: SEO, page speed, A/B testing and lead generation. Started as a two-person dev team; results led to doubling the engineering investment.
Built the front-end architecture for an internal startup producing business software reviews. Custom Wagtail components, lead generation and an internal ad system with measurable outcomes – decisions driven by data, not gut. Two-developer team.
Solo developer on a React Native + Expo app for the free website’s news feed and stock quotes.
Built an entire marketing technology stack from scratch for a separately regulated (SEC) financial division. Two-person team operating with startup autonomy inside an established company. Compliance-aware development in a regulated environment.
Developed commerce and order page front-ends against .NET APIs, running dozens of user-facing A/B tests to optimize conversion. Part of a team of six to eight that generated $100M+ in revenue over two years.
Led 16 front-end developers and UX designers responsible for all company digital properties. Established development standards, code review practices and cross-team coordination.
Hired as the company’s first front-end web developer. Built the front-end development practice from zero: hiring, standards, tooling and team culture. Grew the team over five years into a department.
Freelance and contract web development, including accessible GIS templates for a FEMA flood mapping application.