I'm a full-stack and AI engineer who builds AI-native products end to end — the architecture, the data model, the API, the deploy, and the thing still running in production years later.

I'm CTO and lead full-stack engineer at Pixeden LLC, where I've built and kept alive platforms like Pixeden and Lingrem. I got here from design rather than a computer science degree — I worked as a graphic designer and art director before I started writing code to finish what I was designing instead of handing it off. None of it got replaced; it stacked. It's an accumulation, not a pivot.

I reach for the architecture before I reach for the prompt.

→ lionelt.dev

Rather than read about how I work, ask it. A narrator answers in my voice, grounded in a curated knowledge base, and every answer shows the loop that produced it — reason → retrieve → observe — plus the KB passages it actually used. Retrieval is cosine over a committed JSON index; there's no vector database, on purpose.

The same knowledge base is also a public read-only MCP server at lionelt.dev/api/mcp, so you can connect an MCP client and read the curated source the site is generated from instead of scraping the rendered HTML.

There's a one-page CV at lionelt.dev/cv if you'd rather skim than ask.

A decade of libraries, most of which started as a specific need inside a bigger project and then got finished into something reusable.

• CSShake · 4.9k ★ — Sass library of CSS shake animations, still shipped from cdnjs a decade later
• Reactour · 4.1k ★ — React guided tours, a maintained @reactour/* monorepo, grown out of onboarding users into Orion
• svgson · 473 ★ — SVG parsed into a JSON AST, and back; the SVG-as-data core extracted from Orion's engine

Plus a belt of single-purpose SVG tools, most also shipped as a CLI and a hosted endpoint — svg-outline-stroke, svgsprit.es, element-to-path, path-that-svg, scale-that-svg, svg-path-tools.

At Pixeden LLC as CTO and lead full-stack engineer — I own the architecture, the technical direction and the full-stack build; the products belong to the company.

• Pixeden — design-assets subscription marketplace, ~15k visitors/day, close to a decade live and rewritten underneath itself: a monolith into Node microservices for auth, payments and downloads behind a Next.js BFF, Mongo + Redis, self-hosted. The migration carried a live Joomla/MySQL user base into Mongo lazily — old passwords kept working on first login.
• Lingrem — spaced-repetition language platform, web + iOS from one Next.js/Capacitor codebase. A model generates learning content into Zod-validated structured formats; the SM-2 scheduling stays deterministic behind a separate GraphQL API.
• Orion Icon Library — real-time SVG icon customization: recolor named layers live, export SVG, sprite, icon-font or PDF. Its parser became svgson. No AI.
• Floweden — a config-driven full-stack framework. Declare the data model once as typed kinds; get the GraphQL server, the client operations and a kind-parameterized admin dashboard. Published as @floweden/* and powering real client sites — Lu Photos, i-NEEA, Neocorner, The Collection Paris.

My own

• Tipoff — a basketball live-stats and digital scoresheet app for a coach or statistician working a real game single-handed: a fixed landscape canvas that scale-to-fits any tablet, Vite/React with offline-first CRDT sync (Y.js + y-partykit, one Durable Object per game). Single-device scoring is locked; the multi-writer slice is open work.
• InsideFood — a local-first PWA to track what you eat and when, with a photo and notes. No accounts and no server: everything stays on-device via Dexie/IndexedDB, installable to the Home Screen, with Backup as a first-class action.
• Spik — photo-plus-voice-note capture: shoot a photo, record a narration over it, tag location, then keep it locally or share via encrypted ephemeral links. Web and iOS from one Next.js/Capacitor codebase; on the App Store.

In progress

• Mockupccino — a Python engine that decodes Photoshop smart-object perspective and mesh warps and composites artwork near-interactively, behind FastAPI and a Next.js editor. A working MVP, built by pairing with AI, where the render engine stays deliberately deterministic.
• Aperture — multi-tenant SaaS letting photographers run branded photo-selling stores: Next.js, tRPC, Postgres with row-level security, Stripe Connect.

TypeScript · React · Next.js · Node · GraphQL · tRPC · Python · FastAPI · MongoDB · Postgres · Redis · Stripe · Capacitor · three.js · Tailwind · Docker · self-hosted & Vercel

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_{Argentinean, based in a small hamlet in Italy near a lake. Mate drinker, pandeiro player, deep-sky observer.}