AI-Native Technology Leader
I've spent two decades shipping production software across compliance, fintech, healthcare, and energy — designing the systems, leading the teams, and shaping the organizations those teams worked inside.
How I Work
The foundation, the team, and the shipping are not separate concerns. Get one wrong and the others follow.
Build it right
The foundation determines everything that comes after. Architecture decisions, codebase patterns, knowledge infrastructure — get these wrong early and you spend years working around them. Get them right and everything else compounds.
Lead it well
Engineering teams don't fail because of bad engineers. They fail because of unclear structures, inherited processes, and org designs built for problems that no longer exist. Leadership is diagnosing that — and fixing the actual layer.
Ship it
Two decades across five industries, always from idea to production. Different domains, different stacks, different constraints — same discipline.
Personal Projects
Open Apps
A searchable directory of open-source alternatives to expensive SaaS tools — health scores, weekly picks, and an alternatives finder. Kept current by a local agentic pipeline running on Apple Silicon. No cloud APIs, no SaaS tax.
View project →
DSForms
Open-source, self-hosted form handling for static sites — own your data, no SaaS dependency. Single Go binary, five-minute deploy. Built entirely through agentic development: architecture locked down before any code was written, then executed in structured sessions. I still build things.
View project →What People Say
Baran is one of the most technically capable people I've ever worked with. He has a deep understanding of how platforms should be built from his experience building many platforms in different languages and frameworks. Baran is also very good with identifying technical talent and interviewing them.
Baran is a smart, motivated technologist with a multidisciplinary skill set. He was a natural fit into our startup, providing a welcome mix of design work, software development, marketing/SEO, and business insights. He is a great communicator and seems to at all times have a good attitude. It was a pleasure working with him and we hope to collaborate on something again in the future.
It has been really great working with Baran. He is an excellent developer who has a deep attention to details and always thrives to build a great product. Baran knows his craft, he is the sort of developer that can take an initial idea, tackle it from multiple angles and reshape it into something better that wasn't previously thought of.
Baran is an outstanding developer and technology leader. If there is a box – he thinks outside it. He is one of the best solution innovation minds that I have had the privilege to work with. His ability to create customer value by bringing together modern technology differentiates him and puts him into an elite class of developers. I have enjoyed working with him immensely and would love to do so again.
Latest Posts
The Repository Is All You Need
Tech startups don't need twenty platforms. The codebase is already the product — everything else is a file waiting to live beside it.
The Memory Illusion: AI Persistence Isn't Intelligence
AI memory systems solve storage, not memory. Retrieval precision and relevance judgment are both unsolved — and wrong context actively degrades quality.
First Principles Stopped at the Org Chart
Product decisions get first principles. Org structures get copy-pasted. Conway's Law guarantees the gap costs more than most leaders admit.
AI Will Help You Drift With Confidence
The most expensive thing you can do with AI is hand it the wrong problem. It will not tell you. It will help you drift with confidence — and without domain knowledge, you will not notice until it is too late.