Who builds it.
Every sheet on this site promises one engineer, start to finish. That is a claim worth being able to check, so here is the engineer: the person who scopes the work is the person who writes it, and there is nobody in between to explain later what he meant.
Cristian Penarrieta. Twenty years of software, most of it for Silicon Valley companies, and a company built to spend that on other people’s problems.
The work has been web applications built to hold up at scale, AI features that ship to real users rather than to a demo, and the measurement that decides whether any of it earned its place. Master of Engineering Leadership in Dependable Software Systems from the University of British Columbia. 316Software is where that goes now: custom software and AI systems, for the companies that need them. Greater Vancouver, British Columbia. Work happens in English or Spanish, whichever suits you.
What the twenty years bought
Experience is only worth quoting if you can say what it changes. Four things it changed here.
- Web applications that scale TypeScript on both ends, React in front, Node behind it, and the database, the queue and the deploy underneath. A five-thousand-page site moved onto a modern stack with no downtime and no lost URLs, and a page taken from 160ms to 60ms on the way through. Scale is rarely about traffic. It is about what happens to a codebase after the fifth team has touched it, and whether anyone can still ship on a Friday.
- AI that earns its place An LLM pipeline that took page creation from three days to under an hour: webhook-triggered classification, similarity-based recommendation, generated drafts a person still signs off on. The interesting engineering in an AI feature is almost never the model call. It is the retrieval, the guardrails, the evaluation, and the part that decides when not to use a model at all.
- Growth engineering, and the measuring that goes with it Seven years of experiments, A/B tests, and the instrumentation that decides whether a change was worth shipping, including a self-serve platform that let non-engineers run their own without waiting on a release. Most of what a company calls a feature is really a hypothesis wearing a roadmap, and knowing the difference is what stops a quarter disappearing into something nobody wanted.
- Products shipped alone, start to store KidSecureGames on the App Store, taken alone from the first sketch through code signing to a live listing. Side projects are where an engineer finds out what he actually believes, because there is nobody else to hand the awkward parts to.
Where the training came from
- University of British Columbia Master of Engineering Leadership, Dependable Software Systems. Vancouver, 2017. Half of it is the engineering of systems that are not allowed to fail quietly; the other half is leading the teams that build them. It is the reason the word dependable keeps turning up on this site where a louder company would have written innovative.
- Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas Bachelor of Software Engineering. Lima, Peru, 2009. Five years of fundamentals, and the reason a project here can run in Spanish as easily as in English.
Opinions, held on purpose
- The fewest moving parts the job allows. Every extra service, framework and clever abstraction is something that has to be understood again in two years, by someone who was not in the room when it was chosen.
- AI has to earn its keep. The useful question is never what a model can do. It is which parts of a job are worth handing to one, and which are cheaper, steadier and easier to debug written as ordinary code.
- Measured, or it is a guess. Twenty years teach the same lesson over and over: a shipped change with no way to tell whether it worked is not a result, it is an opinion with a deploy behind it.
- Written so it can be argued with. Decisions go down with their reasoning, the day they are made, so the system can still be questioned by someone who arrives a year later.
Away from the keyboard
Husband, and dad to three. The kids are the whole reason KidSecureGames exists: offline games with no accounts, no ads and nothing at all tracking a six-year-old, because that turned out to be surprisingly hard to buy. Home is Greater Vancouver, under the same mountains that stand behind every illustration on this site.
Elsewhere
When one engineer is the wrong call
One person is the whole promise on this site, and it is also the ceiling. Work that needs five engineers on it by Monday, or on-call cover around the clock from day one, or a supplier large enough to survive a procurement review, is not this. Say so in the first email and you get a straight answer rather than a proposal.
Get in touch
One engineer, start to finish. An answer within one business day.