I fix production systems that move money.
For three years I have owned a Swiss money-transfer platform end to end: forty payment-partner integrations, a SQL Server database of 1,900 stored procedures, the mobile app in both stores, and the Azure bill.
If your revenue runs through a system nobody dares to touch, that is my lane. The query that got slow, the deadlocks at month-end, the partner API that fails silently at 2am, the cloud bill that quietly doubled.
Results
The numbers I can prove.
| Metric | Before | After | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Production deadlocks | 288 / month | ≈ 4 / month | Extended Events captures; alerting still live |
| P95 response time | 1.56 s | 512 ms | 24 months of telemetry, 22.3M requests |
| Mean response time | 448 ms | 190 ms | Same telemetry, on a dashboard I built |
| Monthly Azure bill | CHF 3,335 | CHF 1,356 | Microsoft invoices, Sep 2024 vs May 2026 |
| One reporting page | 66 s | ≈ 1 s | Commit history, timed before and after |
All from one production platform, over three years. On a call I can open any of these and show you where the number comes from.
Services
What I take on.
- SQL Server performance rescue
- The slow queries, the month-end deadlocks, the page everyone avoids clicking. Fixed-price audit first, then remediation, with a measured before and after.
- Payment and correspondent integrations
- Partner APIs that move money: REST, SOAP and SFTP transports, mutual TLS, request signing, idempotency, reconciliation. I have built about forty of them.
- Legacy .NET modernization
- WebForms and .NET Framework systems kept alive and moved forward step by step. No rewrite, no big bang.
- Azure cost review
- Reservations, rightsizing, and enough governance that it does not creep back. I cut a production fintech bill by 59% without dropping a workload.
- AI adoption for regulated teams
- Hands-on training in English, French or Spanish, with the guardrails to go around it, so your developers get the speed without AI tooling ever touching customer data.
Method
How an engagement works.
Diagnosis first, at a fixed price: I audit the system, write up what I found with the evidence, and give you a plan ranked by impact. If you want the fixes done, we agree a scope and I do the work, measured against the same numbers. When I leave, you keep the dashboards, the alerts and the documentation. No lock-in by obscurity.
What I am not: an agency. There are no juniors behind me and no handoffs. I take two clients at a time, I work remote from Quito on US Eastern hours, and if your problem is not something I have actually done before, I will tell you on the first call.
Selected work
Four of them, up close.
SQL Server, Swiss money-transfer platform
From 288 deadlocks a month to about four
Read Committed Snapshot Isolation and a redesign of the worst transactions, but the part that made it possible was capturing the deadlocks properly first.
Read it →React Native, iOS and Android
A money-transfer app, built alone, live in both stores
35 screens in four languages, OIDC with PKCE, biometric unlock, through a pentest remediation cycle and App Store review.
Read it →Incident response, March 2026
Twenty minutes of HTTP 500, and the alert that never came
The Redis instance holding user sessions ran out of memory and every page started returning a 500. The part worth writing down is why nothing paged anyone.
Read it →Business continuity, 18 November 2025
Back online in under half an hour during the Cloudflare outage
Cloudflare was down for nearly six hours and took a good part of the web with it. We were serving again in twenty-something minutes, from a decision made under time pressure that I would rather have made in advance.
Read it →
About
Who is writing this.
Before software I ran restaurants in France, which turns out to be decent training for production incidents. Since 2023 I have been the engineer a Swiss fintech calls when the system that moves the money misbehaves. Associate degree in Computer Science in 2026, BSc in progress. The numbers above come out of telemetry exports, Microsoft invoices and Extended Events captures, which I still have.
Have a system that needs fixing?
Write me two paragraphs about what hurts. I will answer honestly, including when the answer is that you do not need me.
Or read the code: github.com/VirtuaChamp