Developer → Development Team Lead / DevOps Lead
Next Consult
Consultancies live or die on reputation for delivery. Next Consult is where I learned that shipping features is not the same as owning outcomes — and then I was given both: the team, the servers, and the pipelines that kept client work alive.
Impact at a glance
5
Engineers managed
4
Production applications
4
VPS under management
3
Stacks in one CI/CD
Production coverage
What was actually under automated delivery vs left to SSH folklore.
The arc
I started as a software developer and grew into leading a five-person engineering team while taking ownership of the company’s DevOps operations. That progression is the story. I stayed close enough to the code to stay honest, and accountable enough for production to care about Nginx configs, disk space, and the deploy that fails on Friday afternoon. If you are hiring a lead who still understands the metal, this is the chapter that proves it.
What I owned
Four VPS servers. Four production applications. Automated CI/CD with Docker and Jenkins spanning Next.js, Nuxt, and Laravel. Linux administration, Nginx, databases, monitoring — the unglamorous spine of client delivery. I was the bridge between “the client wants this feature” and “it is live, backed up, and we will know if it burns.” That dual ownership (team + ops) is rare in small shops and decisive when deadlines are real.
Making delivery boring
Before systematic pipelines, every release had a personality. After Docker and Jenkins became the default path, deployments stopped being folklore. The team could move faster because the scary part was automated. Clients felt it as reliability; engineers felt it as fewer weekends spent babysitting servers. That is the consulting product, really — calm delivery under pressure.
What improved
The company gained a lead who still shipped, a DevOps practice that was not an afterthought, and production habits that scaled past one person’s memory. For a consultancy, that is brand equity: you become the team that does not disappear when something breaks in production.
What improved
- Grew from individual contributor to lead of a five-person engineering team
- Took full ownership of company DevOps and the production VPS estate
- Introduced automated Docker/Jenkins pipelines across Next.js, Nuxt, and Laravel
- Stabilized Linux, Nginx, database, and monitoring practices for live client apps
- Turned release from a bespoke ritual into a repeatable path the team could run
Tools in play
Next.js · Nuxt · Laravel · Docker · Jenkins · Linux · Nginx · PostgreSQL / MongoDB · VPS
Want something like this on your team? Let’s talk.