Fortunato Geelhoed

When I started building for the web, "frontend" was where you were put before you'd earned the backend. The reward had a ceiling, so I went full-stack early.

Twenty-five years later the industry has cycled twice. Frontend became a specialism: the people who could build fast, polished single-page apps were suddenly the ones in demand. Then AI tooling shifted the equation again. The cost of going deep on both ends at once dropped, and the generalists who never stopped writing backend code found themselves with an edge. This site is part of how I show that: I built it to the same standard in React, Vue, and Angular, on one backend I wrote to serve all three. The deeper backend, data, and infrastructure work is on the career timeline.

In all those years I've never been handed a problem I couldn't ship my way through. Different stacks, different eras, the same habit: get the shape of the problem right, then build the simplest thing that meets the requirements.

I care about code that's correct, tested, and legible. I lean on static analysis and tests that cover the code paths, and I reach for a pattern when it removes more complexity than it adds, not because a convention insists on it. Elegance, to me, is the absence of cleverness you don't need.

At a number of places where I wasn't hired as a lead, I was asked to become one. The work I'm proudest of is quieter than that though: mentoring people, passing on what I've learned, and leaving a team better than I found it.

I took the long way here. I started out in the Netherlands, moved to New Zealand and kept my clients on from there, then spent eleven years in Australia, first in Brisbane and later in Melbourne. A lot of those years were inside agencies, where you learn to ship fast across wildly different clients and codebases. Consulting came after that, and six years ago I went out on my own, back in Europe.

These days I'm on the Costa Blanca in Spain, working through my own company, JiggyBit S.L. The traveling was never only about the job. I like experiencing different places and cultures, and this corner of Spain has everything else I value: space, mountains, long views, and sun. Outside client work, I'm often deep in my own systematic trading system, or fixing up an old Spanish house that needs about as much debugging as the code does.

The timeline has the full story, role by role, and the whole site is open source, so you can read every line.