What a Decade of Product Engineering Taught Me

10 years. One product. Thousands of lessons learned.

In 2013, I co-founded Bondlayer, a visual platform for building websites and mobile apps without code. We were competing with Webflow before most people had heard of "no-code."

Here's what building a SaaS platform for a decade taught me:

🏗️ The Tech Challenge

Before React popularized "virtual DOM," I designed a JSON-based system that represented entire UIs as data. When React launched in 2014, our architecture perfectly matched their approach. Pure luck? Maybe. But it taught me that good abstractions age well.

📱 The Mobile Innovation

We built a hybrid mobile architecture that let users update their entire app without App Store approval. Festival organizers could push live updates during events. 90,000 concurrent users on music festival apps. All on infrastructure costing less than €500/month.

💡 The Hard Truth

Great technology doesn't guarantee business success. We had enterprise clients (Vodafone, NOS, Portuguese Government), happy users, and solid tech. But user acquisition was our bottleneck, not our platform.

5,000 users in 10 years taught me: Marketing > Engineering in terms of difficulty.

🎯 What I'd Do Differently

If starting over:

• Spend 50% of time on distribution (not 90% on product)

• Hire a growth-focused team early on

• Validate market size before building

But I wouldn't change the technical decisions. The architecture was sound.

The Result

300+ websites, 100+ mobile apps, a decade of deep technical experience, and invaluable lessons about building, scaling, and shipping products.

Now I'm applying these lessons to new challenges. Looking for senior engineering roles where deep product experience and architectural thinking matter.

From Solo Developer to Technical Leader: My 10-Year Journey

From solo developer to technical leader: My 10-year journey.

Year 1-3: The Solo Grind

• Coded 12+ hours/day

• Every decision was mine

• Every line of code was mine

• Learned by doing (and breaking things)

Lesson: You can ship a lot as a solo developer. But you can't scale yourself.

Year 4-7: First Time Leading

• Hired first engineer

• Struggled with delegation (I can code it faster!)

• Code reviews felt slow

• Realized: My job isn't writing code anymore

Lesson: Mentoring takes longer than doing. But it multiplies impact.

Year 8-10: Technical Strategy

• 50% coding, 50% architecture/leadership

• Focus shifted to: What should we build? How should we build it?

• Empowered team to execute

• I handled the complex/custom work

Lesson: The best leaders write less code but enable more code to be written.

💡 The Paradox

More seniority = less coding But your impact grows
As a solo dev, I shipped features. As a lead, I shipped engineers who ship features.

🤔 What I Learned About Leadership

✅ Great leaders make others great
✅ Context matters more than code
✅ Strategic "no" is more valuable than tactical "yes"
✅ Technical debt is a business decision
✅ Mentorship is a long-term investment
✅ Your ego is not your code