Software Gardener Engineering consultant
Code that grows. Teams that thrive.
I help engineering teams keep their codebases alive and growing through better testing, sharper architecture, and a culture that rewards small daily care over heroic rewrites.
What I do
Most codebases get harder to change as they grow. The metaphor of the codebase as a building gives us terms like "technical debt" and "refactoring". Both framings suggest the work is rare, costly, exceptional.
A garden is closer to the truth. Every day you weed a little, prune a little, water a little. Small ongoing care that compounds into something that grows rather than ossifies.
My work is to help teams adopt that frame. I've spent the last twenty years building software at startups, as a founding member of the Wix Engineering organization and later VP of Engineering at Orbs.com. Today I work as an independent consultant.
How we can work together
- 01
Holistic Consultation
Embedded with your team for weeks or months. Testing strategy, architecture, code review, hands-on work alongside your engineers.
- 02
SDLC Optimization
Improving how software actually gets built day-to-day. Human-centric and AI-agent-centric workflows, tooling, and feedback loops.
- 03
Executive Mentorship
1-on-1 with VPs of R&D and CTOs on the engineering-org questions you can't easily Google: strategy, structure, leadership, the long-run bets.
- 04
Hiring & Interviewing
Working with management on hiring strategy and actively interviewing candidates, drawing on years of growing engineering orgs from 20 to 1,000+.
Recent writing
All posts →-
Codin' On A Prayer
AI Agents are just like human contractors only faster; to make them work at scale and in a stable manner, you need to use deterministic, executable checks like tests, compilers, linters, etc - otherwise you're doing no better than prayer.
-
Case Study: Three Years at HoneyBook, From “Soft Consensus” to a Coherent Engineering Culture
There’s a particular kind of joy in seeing seeds you planted years ago take root. Watching an engineering organization grow over the course of several years, and seeing ideas we introduced become part of its everyday rhythm, have been some of the most gratifying parts of my work. This is the story of how a small engagement with HoneyBook evolved into a multi-year partnership that shaped everything from testing to architecture to culture. What began as a simple mission of technology evaluation an
-
Integrative UI/Backend Acceptance Tests with NestJS and React
In the final post of this series, we’ll cover how applications where both the frontend and the backend are built with Javascript can benefit from a novel approach to testing: in-process, JSDOM-based acceptance tests that drive the UI, but incorporate a backend that uses memory fakes for speed and determinism. The benefits are substantial: with this type of tests, we do not need to mock or fake the backend, thus eliminating a whole class of bugs and testing infrastructure. Each test runs its own
Trusted by teams at
-
Loora -
Groundcover -
Surf - Supercreator
- Apprentice AI
More from clients →"Shai's expertise, dedication, and hands-on approach have been instrumental in revolutionizing our front-end testing strategy."
Have a codebase that needs tending?
Tell me what you're working on. I read every message.
Get in touch