javier@aberdeen ~ $ cat application.md
Ten years on the other end of the support email, and a machine I own.
Apple Retail, 2014 to 2024: diagnosis, the Genius Bar, remote support, then leading shop-floor experience across two stores. Now I build and ship small software of my own, and Omarchy is what I work on every day.
This is an unaffiliated application to 37signals, written in the idiom of the operating system you incubated. Your jobs page says nothing is open. Good — then this isn't a cold apply to a req. It's a candidate telling you where he is, and asking what the distance is.
~/whoami who I am
Javier Ponz. Originally from Madrid, living in Aberdeen, Scotland. Career changer, second year, studying AI and full-stack development.
Between 2014 and 2024 I worked across Apple Retail Spain, with responsibilities including Specialist, Technical Specialist and, for six and a half years, Genius — plus a spell as a remote AppleCare Support Advisor during COVID. Mostly hands-on diagnosis: difficult cases, incomplete information, people with very different levels of technical confidence.
Twice I left the bench for a seven-month In-Store Experience Lead secondment. Planning, resourcing, the situations that fit no procedure. Both taught me the same thing: leading is serving. Not being the cleverest person in the room — making the room work. I had that sentence written down long before I read anyone's doctrine, and I'd rather say so than pretend it came from agreeing with you.
~/bin what I bring
Not five years of production engineering. Ten years of support, operating discipline and customer-facing problem solving, pointed at software I now write and run myself.
It isn't a rotation for me
You put everyone on support because it keeps the company honest. I did it as the whole job, for a decade, in person and on the phone — thousands of people arriving angry, confused, or holding a dead machine with their only copy of something on it.
Small things, actually finished
Thirteen sites in production on a VPS I administer: Docker Swarm, Traefik, Let's Encrypt, a health check on each one and a release gate that refuses to publish on red. Boring in the way working software should be.
Run daily, with a leash
MCP tools, skills and Docker, every day. Explicit context and permissions, then verify what comes back. I label which of my repositories I wrote and which I specified for an agent to write, because blurring that line is how trust goes.
~/src built and shipped
Inspect the work rather than take my word for it.
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Shipped solo
Memento Mori
A privacy-first web product: no accounts, no analytics, nothing to log in to. Plain HTML, CSS and ES modules. Docker, nginx and Traefik behind release checks.
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Specified · agent-built · a fork
The Aberdeen Daily
A local morning paper for this city that writes itself at 06:00, checks itself, and deploys itself within fifteen minutes of the commit. The editorial contract is narrow on purpose — positive and practical only, every story with its sources, never a venue, date or price the source did not give — and the build refuses an edition that still has unresolved marks in it. A fork of vaelkeep/hermes-paper-agent, adapted and operated by me.
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Specified · agent-built
Hermes PKM Toolkit
MCP tools for local Markdown vaults, with path-traversal protection and tests — because giving a model file access needs a boundary I can explain out loud.
Every repository I own states its scope, its status and what it is not. I would rather publish a short honest README than a long one that oversells — and I'd rather show you the line between what I wrote and what an agent wrote than blur it.
~/fit why 37signals, by way of Omarchy
I didn't arrive at 37signals by reading the founder. I arrived by running the things: a machine I can alter, plain files I can read, software small enough to finish. Omarchy is the first desktop that treated that as the point rather than an inconvenience, and it sent me back to the company that incubated it.
The Omarchy Doctrine runs ten lines. Five of them already describe how I work, which is the only reason this page is worth your time:
- Own the machineMy own VPS, administered by me: thirteen services, no platform-as-a-service between me and the box. Omarchy on the desk for the same reason.
- Command is serviceTwo secondments leading shop-floor experience. The job was clearing what was in the team's way and handing over the reasoning instead of the answer.
- Welcome the agentsAgents in my daily loop, with explicit permissions and verification — and with the authorship of every repository stated plainly.
- Beauty is truthRelease gates that refuse to publish on red. A README that says what a thing is not. Taste, spent on the boring parts.
- You're somebody nowI'm a career changer with no computer-science degree. Your jobs page says you don't care where I went to school — which is fortunate, because the answer is: I'm still going.
The rest of the fit is the company, not the OS. Six-week cycles and a calm, low-distraction place to work are how I already operate: one thing at a time, finished, documented, deployed. A "Manager of One" is what running your own production estate makes of you whether you wanted it or not.
~/gap where I'm still learning
The gap is specific. I'll name it once and not decorate it.
- Ruby and Rails — not a language I know. I'm not going to claim it to the person who wrote the framework. If it matters, tell me and it becomes the next thing I learn properly rather than the next thing I skim.
- Backend engineering at depth — APIs and auth, observability, networking, the infrastructure around production systems. I run Docker, Traefik and nginx in production; I have not shipped enterprise software for five years, and I won't write like I have.
- Omarchy contributions — I run it. I have not landed a patch. That is a thing I intend, not a thing I'm claiming, and it stays off this page until it's true.
- Seniority — I'm early and I know it. I'd rather show you what I've built and let you judge the level than tell you a number.
What I do have: a decade of hands-on support, the habit of finding the fault instead of performing confidence, and the willingness to learn in the place where the system has to work. I learn this with an LLM and an agent harness beside me, and I'm after the 20% that makes a system operable — enough to deploy it, read what the harness proposes, and catch it when it's wrong.
~/logistics based, available, reachable
Aberdeen, Scotland. Comfortable across UK and European hours and used to overlapping with the US afternoon. Happy to travel when being in the room matters, open to relocation for the right fit. No notice period — I can start now.
~/contact the ask
There's no opening, so I'm not asking for one. The ask is smaller and it doesn't expire:
Tell me what the distance is between where I am and someone you'd hire. I'll go close it and come back with the work, not the claim.