Open to new opportunities

I build fast, friendly software
and a few weird toys.

Hi, I am Patrick, a full-stack engineer up in the Seattle area. I ship production Rails, Python, and React, I make slow databases embarrassingly fast, and lately I am completely galvanized by Claude Code and agentic coding. When I am off the clock I turn that same toolkit loose on games, map quizzes, and reader apps just to see what sticks.

See the playground → What I have shipped
📍 Renton, WA · Pacific time 💻 Full-stack · backend-leaning 🌎 Remote, self-directed ✉️ levelbrookteam@gmail.com
Career highlights

Things I am quietly proud of

A decade of production web engineering, mostly on small senior teams where you own the whole stack, get paged when it breaks, and are on the hook for the fix.

$400K/yr

Cut a cloud bill without deleting a byte

Redesigned archival for petabyte-scale media on AWS. The trick was not heroics, it was S3 Intelligent-Tiering plus Glacier Deep Archive on the cold tail, saving roughly $400K a year while every object stayed retrievable.

AWS S3Glacier Deep ArchiveIntelligent-TieringFinOps
$4M→$13M

Grew with the business, not against it

Senior engineer on a small Rails backend team through a run from about $4M to $13M in ARR. Shipped product, wired up partner integrations, and kept reliability climbing while the load did too.

Ruby on RailsPostgreSQLREST APIswebhooks
10×

Made Postgres stop hurting

Hunted down N+1 queries, added compound and trigram indexes, denormalized the hottest read paths, and pushed reads to replicas with caching in front. A 1TB-class database that used to time out started answering in milliseconds.

query tuningdenormalizationcompound indexesread replicascaching
3am

The pager was mine

Ran real incident response on a PagerDuty on-call rotation, using New Relic APM to trace the slow spans back to the offending query or dependency. Wrote the postmortem, shipped the guardrail, and made sure the same fire did not start twice.

New Relic APMPagerDutyincident responseobservability
1 team

Turned an offshore team around

Inherited a struggling offshore team on a big TypeScript and React codebase. No reorg, no drama. Just proactive communication across time zones, a genuinely positive tone in reviews, and clear code standards everyone could actually follow. Velocity and morale both came back.

TypeScriptReactcode standardsmentorshipteam lead
0→1

Prototypes on a stopwatch

My favorite gear. Give me a fuzzy idea in the morning and I will hand you something clickable and deployed by the afternoon. Every project further down this page started as a same-day prototype that got out of hand.

rapid prototypingMVPsagentic codingship it
The playground

Stuff I made because I wanted to

All live, all built solo, mostly on nights and weekends. This is where I test-drive new ideas, new stacks, and how far a single engineer with Claude Code can really get.

🗺️open ↗

LinguaGuessr

lingua.levelbrook.com

GeoGuessr, but for your ears. Listen to a clip of someone speaking and drop a pin on the map where you think the language is spoken. A whole audio corpus pipeline, translation, and a snappy map UI behind it.

audio pipelineJSAWS TranslateCloudflare
🤖open ↗

NULLSECTOR

nullsector.levelbrook.com

A Core War style programming game. You write tiny battle programs in a friendly little assembly and set them loose in a shared arena. Custom register VM in the browser, plus a ghost and Elo server so your bot fights other people's bots.

virtual machinegame designEloTypeScript
📖open ↗

Distilled Viewer

reader.levelbrook.com

My favorite thing I have built. Long talks and podcasts get transcribed, distilled by LLM sub-agents, and typeset into a calm, genuinely readable reader. A quiet corner of the internet for actually finishing the long stuff.

WhisperLLM distillationcontent pipelinetypography
💎open ↗

Gem Cascade

gemcascade.levelbrook.com

A juicy match-3 with no art assets at all. Every gem is drawn by a shader, every sound effect is synthesized in code at boot. Ran hundreds of headless games to balance it. Pure engineering pretending to be candy.

GodotshadersWASMheadless sim
🍳open ↗

Recipes

recipes.levelbrook.com

A clean, ad-free recipe reader with none of the life-story preamble. Because I wanted to cook, not scroll past someone's trip to Tuscany to find how much flour.

static sitecontent designfast
☯️open ↗

I Ching

iching.levelbrook.com

A dark, bronze, meditative take on the old coin oracle. Throw the hexagram, read the reading. Mostly an excuse to obsess over mood, motion, and typography for an evening.

interaction designanimationJS
⚡open ↗

Rails 8 + Hotwire demo

demo.levelbrook.com

A working showcase of modern Rails: a Jira-grade Kanban board that syncs live across browsers, and a chat that streams LLM tokens in real time over Server-Sent Events. All the fiddly Turbo and streaming details, done right.

Rails 8Hotwire/TurboSSEAction Cable
📦open ↗

Open source

github.com/tachyurgy

Small, real, tested gems. ai_stream is a Ruby implementation of the Vercel AI SDK stream protocol so a Rails backend can drive a modern streaming AI UI. Plus picoglob and fzy_score for the fun of a tight algorithm.

Ruby gemsai_streamopen sourcetests
How I actually work

One engineer, a lot of leverage

Everything on this page was built and shipped by one person. That is only possible because of how I work now, and it is the part I am most excited to bring into a team.

🤝

Agentic coding, for real

I lean hard on Claude Code as a genuine pair. I stay the architect and the reviewer, and I get the throughput of a small team. I would love to help a company figure out how to do this well.

⚡

Prototype in the morning, real by night

I move from idea to a deployed, clickable thing fast, then harden the parts that matter. Vibecoding to find the shape, then real tests and real error handling before it ships.

🚀

Boring infra that just works

Static front ends on Cloudflare Pages, real apps in Docker on a couple of Hetzner boxes behind Kamal. Cheap, fast, and mine to fix at 3am. Every link on this page runs on it.

The people part

I also make teams better

"Turning a team around is not a reorg. It is a hundred small kind, clear moments in a row."

The engineering I am proudest of is not a query plan, it is a team. I once inherited a struggling offshore team on a large TypeScript and React codebase. Reviews were tense, velocity was low, and everyone was a little defensive.

No shakeup. I over-communicated across the time-zone gap so nobody was ever guessing, kept reviews genuinely warm and specific instead of nitpicky, and wrote down clear, boring code standards so "good" stopped being a matter of opinion. Within a couple of months the team was faster, the code was more consistent, and people actually wanted to open a PR again.

I like being the senior engineer who makes the room calmer and the codebase cleaner at the same time. That is the job.

The toolkit

What I reach for

Languages
Ruby, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, SQL, a little Go
Backend
Ruby on Rails, Django, FastAPI, Flask, Node, REST and GraphQL APIs, webhooks, background jobs (Sidekiq, ActiveJob)
Frontend
React, TypeScript, Hotwire / Turbo / Stimulus, Tailwind, responsive product UI
Data
PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, query optimization, indexing, denormalization, read replicas, caching
Cloud & ops
AWS (S3, RDS, SES, SQS, Lambda, CloudWatch), Docker, Kamal, Cloudflare, CI/CD, New Relic APM, PagerDuty, on-call
AI
Claude Code and agentic workflows, LLM feature integration, streaming AI UIs, the ai_stream gem
Currently open

Let us build something.

I am looking for my next role, ideally somewhere that ships fast, cares about craft, and is curious about what agentic coding can really do. If that sounds like you, I would love to talk.

levelbrookteam@gmail.com GitHub LinkedIn