1993 STILL SHIPPING

Thirty years of writing code. I never stopped.

I'm Edwin Gonzales — an engineering lead who builds production systems in Python, FastAPI, Odoo and PostgreSQL, and who still writes and reviews code every day. I work AI-first with Claude Code and Cursor, and I take features from a vague requirement all the way to something running in front of real users.

Nueva Vizcaya, Philippines · remote worldwide edwin@pithtech.net github.com/gonzalesedwin1123

01 — Introduction

A minute, in my own words

Who I am, what I've built, and how I work.

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02 — Selected work

A public API for a national benefits platform

The piece of work I'd point to first: an API layer that lets mobile apps, partner systems and government agencies read and write beneficiary data safely — inside a platform that decides who receives social assistance.

OpenSPP — API v2, consent & audit

Open-source social protection platform used in national government programmes. I lead engineering and wrote much of this myself.

The problem

Country teams needed to connect field apps and partner systems to the registry. The existing interface was all-or-nothing — anything that could read a record could read every record, and there was no way to prove after the fact who changed what.

What I built

A FastAPI service layer with OAuth2 and PKCE for native clients, scoped permissions per consumer, standards-based data-exchange endpoints, a structured change-request workflow so corrections are reviewed rather than applied silently, and record-level audit logging.

The hard part

Authorisation couldn't live in the endpoint alone. A missed check would leak citizen data, so access rules are enforced at the record layer too — the API can't accidentally hand back something the caller shouldn't see.

The result

Third parties integrate without direct database access. Every change to a beneficiary record is attributable. Shipped test-first, with the suite committed alongside the feature and gated in CI.

Read the source About OpenSPP
Python FastAPI PostgreSQL OAuth2 / PKCE Odoo Docker CI/CD

03 — How I work

Ownership, tests, and AI that gets checked

What you get if you hire me, described honestly.

End to end

I take a loosely defined problem through discovery, plan, build, test and release. I don't need a finished ticket to start.

Test-first

Unit and integration suites written alongside the feature, not after it, and gated in CI before anything reaches production.

Stakeholder-facing

A decade translating policy and business requirements into specifications developers can build against — and saying no when the ask is wrong.

Still hands-on

I lead engineering and I write production code. Estimates and architecture calls hold up because I'm in the codebase.

AI tools I use daily

Claude Code is my primary development environment — planning, implementation, refactoring and documentation. Cursor for in-editor work. I've also built Claude API features into products, where the model returns structured configuration that downstream code consumes rather than free text.

The part that matters isn't the tooling, it's the discipline around it. I rolled AI-assisted development out to a working team, which meant deciding what has to change: scoped prompts, project rules, disciplined diff review, and validation before merge. AI raises the bar on specification quality — vague requirements produce confidently wrong code, quickly. Output gets checked, not trusted.

04 — Experience

What I've shipped

Thirty-three years, in order. The recent work first.

2025 — present

Head of Engineering

OpenSPP

  • Lead engineering for an Odoo-based platform of 100+ modules running in national government programmes.
  • Own the technical roadmap, release scope, and governance; review every significant pull request.
  • Designed and shipped the v2 API layer, change-request workflow, consent and audit subsystems.
  • Introduced AI-assisted development across the team, with the review standards to keep it safe.
2025 — present

Resource Person & Technical Consultant

Asian Development Bank

  • Advise government stakeholders on enterprise architecture and open-source adoption for digital transformation programmes.
  • Audit technical solutions for scalability and security; deliver capacity-building workshops to implementing agencies.
2020 — present

Founder & Principal Engineer

pithtech

  • Client engineering consultancy: architecture, full-stack build, AWS deployment and ongoing support.
  • Delivered a full Odoo 19 production system on AWS for a US manufacturing and retail client — EC2, Aurora PostgreSQL, CloudFront, WAF, CI/CD.
  • Built multi-channel sales consolidation with Shopify integration and REST ingestion from external retail systems.
2022 — 2025

OpenSPP Lead Developer

Newlogic, Inc.

  • Owned release management, CI/CD and code quality for national-scale deployments.
  • Guided project managers, product owners and architects from incomplete requirements to buildable work.
2016 — 2019

Head of Operations / Co-Owner

Pitch Technologies

  • Ran delivery across concurrent ERP projects; managed the technical support team.
  • Customised Odoo accounting to meet Philippine BIR accreditation requirements.
2013 — 2014

Chief Technology Officer

Electronics Health Records International

  • Led development of a Hospital Information System and EMR.
  • Designed interoperability with national health systems and insurer integrations.
2010 — 2022

Independent Consultant & Software Developer

Freelance

  • Full-stack systems for education, healthcare and commerce clients — usually as the only engineer accountable for the result.
  • Designed and built a custom CRM for a real estate client: lead pipeline, contact and property relationships, activity tracking.
1995 — 2010

Director, Computing & Information Systems / Faculty

Saint Mary's University

  • Directed university-wide systems, infrastructure and security for fifteen years.
  • Taught programming; mentored undergraduate and graduate students; presented research internationally.
  • Delivered business intelligence training (Pentaho) covering ETL, data modelling and reporting.
1993 — 1995

Instructor

Central Luzon State University — Computer Training Center

  • Taught programming and built the training centre's information system.

05 — Also built

Other things I've shipped

Shorter versions, in case one of them is closer to what you need.

Made-to-measure configurator

Real-time suit configurator for a retail client — Flutter client, FastAPI and Odoo backend, S3 and CloudFront asset delivery, layered 2D compositing, and a Claude API concierge that returns structured design configuration the render pipeline consumes. Flutter · FastAPI · Claude API · AWS

Multi-channel sales dashboard

Consolidated daily sales for a multi-store retail group: REST ingestion from external shop systems plus a Shopify integration handling OAuth, permanent tokens and rate-limit-aware sync. Replaced channel-by-channel manual reporting. Python · Shopify API · PostgreSQL

Odoo 19 on AWS

Production deployment for a US garment manufacturer: EC2, Aurora PostgreSQL, CloudFront, WAF, CloudWatch, SES and IAM, with multi-repo deployment automation and CI/CD. Requirements through go-live, and still supporting it. AWS · Odoo · CI/CD

Hospital information system

Led development of an HIS and EMR with interoperability into national health systems and insurer integrations — high-consequence data flows where the failure cases drove the architecture. Healthcare · Interoperability

06 — Detail

Stack & background

The full list, for anyone matching against a specification.

Backend

Python, FastAPI, REST API design, OAuth2 and PKCE, microservices, Node.js, Odoo and ORM design, PHP, C++. C#/.NET in production earlier in my career.

Frontend

React, TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, OWL, Flutter and Dart.

Data

PostgreSQL — schema design, migrations, query profiling. Aurora, Oracle, MySQL/MariaDB, SQLite. Metabase, Superset, ETL workflows.

Cloud & infrastructure

AWS (EC2, Aurora, S3, CloudFront, WAF, CloudWatch, SES, IAM), Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Cloudflare, Docker, Kubernetes, Nginx, Linux administration, GitHub Actions and CI/CD.

AI engineering

Claude Code, Cursor, Claude API integration, structured-output prompting and validation, AI-assisted refactoring and review, guardrails for AI-generated code.

Delivery

Test-driven development, code review standards, release management, Git and GitHub workflows, Jira, Slack, Google Workspace, technical documentation and training.

Education

MSc Information TechnologyPolytechnic University of the Philippines, 2009

BSc Computer ScienceAMA University, Quezon City, 1993

Published & presented

Research on open-source LMS and ERP adoption, presented in Thailand, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Macau. National Board of Trustees, Philippine Society of IT Educators, 2006–2009.

07 — Get in touch

edwin@pithtech.net

Open to remote engineering roles worldwide. I read everything and reply to anything specific.

Send me an email See my GitHub