The longer story

I've spent fifteen years in tech. I started as a Windows Phone developer, of all things, and moved to full-stack JavaScript around 2017–18. Mostly freelance, the whole way through.

For most of those years my specialty was helping companies take an idea to a first shipped product and into the market. I've since narrowed, deliberately: the work now is subscription infrastructure for ecommerce brands. This site is mostly about that.

Two long-running things shaped the narrowing. The first is TVDL, a consumer video downloader I run — up since 2019. How it started is a story for another day. What it taught me belongs here: software that stays running for years is a different discipline from software that demos well.

The second is The Cumin Club, a client since 2019–20, where I've built subscriptions every way they can be built. Their ordering platform started fully custom — Next.js and Stripe, written by me. Over the years I moved it onto Shopify and Seal Subscriptions, for the ecosystem: first-party integrations for retention and reviews, and a checkout built and tested for ecommerce. Seal took over the billing; the parts subscribers and the team touch stayed custom, built on the APIs — account management, admin infrastructure the team runs the program from, retention logic the app doesn't ship. These days it's ongoing experimentation: analytics instrumentation, and an AI-assisted theme-iteration pipeline that ships variants through Shopify's native rollouts.

Running one program fully custom, on an app, and past the app's limits is most of what I know about where that boundary belongs — and why I sometimes advise less custom than people come in wanting.

I work as a nomad; right now that means Phuket, Thailand. Travel is the one thing I'd do even if nothing about it were useful.

If you're here about Shopify subscriptions, the work lives at saif.dev/shopify-subscriptions. For anything else: hey@saif.dev.