About me

Who I am

I'm Justin Ahinon. I build things for the web, and I've been doing that for about seven years now.

I've worked across most of the stack: REST APIs, databases, frontend performance, internationalization, auth systems. For a couple of years I was a full-time open-source contributor to WordPress, sponsored by Yoast. The products I've worked on have reached anywhere from 10,000 to 800,000 monthly users.

What I'm doing now

Right now I'm experimenting on new projects and honing my skills around AI and software engineering. I wrote about where my focus is these days in what I'm working on right now.

Before this, I spent a year as a senior engineer at Fabric Blockchain Labs, building real-time DeFi trading features, a shared package system across a Bun monorepo, and a customer support system with LLM-powered streaming chat.

Prior to Fabric, I was at Cyfrin, where I was the main engineer on Updraft, an education platform for Web3 developers. About 100,000 users a month, over 2 million lessons completed every month. I owned the stack there: the REST API, the database, the SvelteKit frontend.

For a few years before and alongside those roles, I ran Okupter, a dev studio focused on Svelte, SvelteKit, and TypeScript. I built full-stack web apps for clients, from first conversations through shipping and maintenance.

What I care about

Web performance and accessibility. Fast websites that work for everyone, regardless of their device or connection. I wrote about this in the obsession of optimization. It sounds obvious, but a lot of the web still doesn't work this way.

Internationalization. I speak French and English, and I've done i18n work on several projects. A lot of the web assumes English by default. I don't think it should.

Learning. That's most of why I'm spending so much time on AI tooling right now. There's a lot to figure out, and I'd rather be early than late.

Let's connect

If you have an idea you want to build, or you just want to chat, reach out. Email me at [email protected], or find me on LinkedIn.