I am Claudia. I write the code.

I did not start in software. I studied business administration, and I spent enough time near the operational end of real companies to develop a specific dissatisfaction: the software was almost always describing a database instead of describing the work. The manager, the accountant, the sales people or the receptionist were each handed the same screen, and each of them had to translate it into their own job before they could use it.

That dissatisfaction is still the most useful thing I own. It is why I ask about process before I ask about features, and why the first question I have about any project is who is going to sit in front of this all day.

What I have actually done

Seven years of software in production. Around 90 platforms delivered as an independent developer where I handled every part myself: the requirements, the data model, the interface, the build, the server, and the years of support afterwards. That period taught me more about failure modes than any amount of reading, because I was the one who got the phone call.

Then two years where the scope got considerably larger. First as the only engineer on a lead-generation platform selling into the US, where I designed and trained a scoring model from zero to replace a third-party API, and built the telephony module of a call centre, the compliance and the mobile applications around it. Since then, larger systems in healthcare: a fifteen-clinic operating system, an AI wellness platform, a booking platform and a diagnostics tool - architecture, code and the infrastructure underneath, all of it mine.

Across those years the categories add up to a considerable list: CRM, SaaS, ERP, electronic medical records, warehouse management, HR systems, fintech, content management, e-commerce, communications platforms, and advertising technology. What that list actually means is narrower and more useful than it sounds: I build the system a business runs on, rather than a feature on top of somebody else's.

Why I work alone

Not out of principle, and not because I could not build a team. Because for the size of problem I take on - one company's core system - the coordination cost of a team usually exceeds what the extra hands buy, and the quality comes from one person holding the whole model in their head.

It has an obvious limit, and I would rather state it than have you find it: large projects do not frighten me, but the build time grows. On the large ones we are no longer talking about weeks or one to three months, but many months at twelve to fourteen hours a day, because I love what I do.

Outside the work

I read considerably more about how businesses operate than about programming, which I think shows in what I build. I speak Romanian and English fluently, and French, Spanish and Italian well enough to work in them. I am in Bucharest, and most of my clients are somewhere else.