Senior full-stack engineer on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Twenty-five years building for the web, fifteen of them in enterprise engineering at Dyn and Oracle. I now run Ascent Web Solutions, a boutique web studio, and built and released SyteCheck, a website-analysis SaaS product of my own.

I write Python, TypeScript, React, and PHP, work in Linux and cloud infrastructure, and care more about what a system looks like in five years than what it looks like on launch day.

Currently open to: contract engineering engagements, permanent roles, and website projects for businesses and organizations.

Three separate things, and I'm happy with any of them.

• Contract engineering. Agency overflow, fixed-scope builds, migrations, and integration work. Remote, US Eastern, used to being the only engineer on a distributed team.
• Permanent roles. Senior or staff-level full-stack, platform, or infrastructure work. Remote, or hybrid within reach of Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
• Website projects. Fixes, refreshes, and rebuilds for small businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations, through the studio.

If I'm not the right fit for what you need, I'll say so. That has cost me work and kept me clients for a decade.

📧 erik@ascentwebs.com · 🔗 LinkedIn · 🌐 ascentwebs.com/capabilities · 📄 Résumé

sytecheck.app · Python · FastAPI · Celery · React · TypeScript · Postgres · Redis · Playwright · Docker

The tools that audit a website properly are priced for enterprises and shaped for marketers. The free one is a developer's utility with no accounts, no history, and no report you'd put in front of a client. SyteCheck closes that gap: ten categories of analysis against any URL — HTML validity, SEO, broken links, WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility, performance, security headers, responsive layout, content freshness, AI visibility, and a visual and aesthetic evaluation — returned as one scored report written primarily for the site's owner rather than for a specialist.

The visual category is the part nobody else ships: the page is rendered at three viewport sizes, screenshotted, and scored against a structured rubric for typography, whitespace, color, hierarchy, and how prominent the calls to action are.

Behind it is an async Celery worker pool doing the slow work over Postgres and Redis, a FastAPI service with a public API — keys, webhooks, and rate limits — and a React front end that uses that same API. Containerized and deployed behind Cloudflare.

The code was the more straightforward half. The rest is what decides whether something is a product or a demo: product requirements from a market and competitive analysis, a thorough architecture design and a phased product development plan, a cost model measured per scan, plan entitlements enforced at the chokepoints rather than merely published, billing through a merchant of record so tax is handled everywhere it sells, a retention policy a scheduled purge job actually carries out, and a tenant isolation boundary pinned by a test suite that sweeps every route one tenant could use to reach another's data.

One engineer, idea to deployed and monetized product. It's the clearest evidence I have of what I can hold on my own.

Fifteen years at Dyn and Oracle Cloud, on an email delivery platform that grew past six billion messages a month.

It was far more than a website: a console UI, a public API for automation, inbound and outbound SMTP subsystems, caching layers, and the bounce, complaint, unsubscribe, and engagement handling behind them. Hundreds of servers, over twenty hostclasses, millions of lines of code, and a 99.9% uptime commitment.

I led the migration that moved that service — and several hundred customers — from on-prem to cloud with zero downtime. Capacity planning, compute and storage planning, data migration in flight, operations and feature parity, and a phased plan that held while customers kept using the service throughout. Rebuilding an airplane already in flight.

That work is where the discipline comes from, and I apply it to sites a thousand times smaller: plan the migration, keep the links, test on the real thing, and never launch on a Friday. Twenty-five years in, I've been the person who builds it, the person who migrates it, and the person who gets called when it falls over at 2am. The last one shapes how I approach the first two.

I've kept a practice for small businesses and nonprofits the whole way through, and it is now the studio. Several outcomes rather than a list of deliverables:

ascentwebs.com is itself a working sample: Astro, static output from Markdown files, plain CSS on brand tokens, zero JavaScript bundle, a generated hash-based CSP, WCAG 2.2 AA verified (with SyteCheck) rather than assumed, and no third-party request on any page but the one that needs a CAPTCHA. Deployed to Cloudflare Workers, and blazing fast.

I develop alongside AI daily — not as an experiment, and not as autocomplete. SyteCheck and the studio site were both built this way, start to finish, and the approach is now part of what I'm hired for.

What it looks like in practice:

• Written conventions the model has to follow. Each repo carries a CLAUDE.md covering architecture, voice, accessibility, motion, and security policy. Most of what makes AI-assisted work good or bad is decided before any code is generated.
• Specification first, then code. Requirements, architecture, and a plan, written down and argued with. The model is better at the second half than the first, and it's very willing to build the wrong thing quickly.
• I read every line, and I'm the reviewer. Generated code gets the same scrutiny as a colleague's pull request, plus a bias toward deleting it. A build passing is not the same as the code being correct.
• Verification over vibes. Typecheck, tests, and the real thing in a real browser. Contrast ratios computed, not eyeballed; measured values recorded in comments so the next person — or the next model — doesn't re-guess them.
• Judgment stays mine. What to build, what to refuse, what a client actually needs, and what happens to it in five years. Twenty-five years of scar tissue is the part that doesn't come out of a model.

The honest summary: it makes a senior engineer considerably faster and does nothing for the parts that were always the hard ones.

Languages & frameworks — TypeScript · Python · React · JavaScript · PHP · Java · Node · SQL · SMTP

Platforms & infrastructure — Linux · Docker · AWS · OCI · Cloudflare · Render · Postgres · Redis · Git · CI/CD · Google Workspace · Claude Code

Web & CMS — WordPress · WooCommerce · Astro · Squarespace

The work itself — Full-stack applications · Website rebuilds · Platform migrations · Systems integration · Performance and Core Web Vitals · Accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA) · Technical SEO · AI-assisted development

• All 115 of the Northeast's 4,000-foot peaks, hiked in winter. It took considerably longer than any website I've built. The mountain in my logo isn't decoration.
• I sing in choirs, which is how a fair number of my projects came to exist. I'm a regular soloist and cantor as well.
• A native New Englander — New Hampshire born, Cape Cod based — and reliably happier outdoors than in.
• Traveler and Adventurer - valuing experiences rather than things, taking in varied architecture and cultures internationally and domestically

_{Cape Cod, Massachusetts · Remote, US Eastern · erik@ascentwebs.com}