▍ Andrew Drake · Fractional CTO · Senior Engineer
Shipping Ground Breaking
Software since
1997
I'm a freelance CTO and senior engineer specialising in the TALL stack — Tailwind, Alpine, Laravel, Livewire. 29 years turning ambiguous briefs into systems that ship, scale and don't wake you up at 3 a.m.
- Years shipping
- 29
- Sectors worked
- 10+
- Stack focus
- TALL
- Since
- 1997
A long arc
A career built across three decades of the web.
From first hand-rolled PHP sites in the late 90s to today's reactive TALL-stack applications — same craft, sharper tools.
-
1997
First lines shipped
Hand-coded HTML/PHP sites for small businesses. Learned the discipline of "make it work on production".
-
2005
E-commerce & SaaS
Built and operated technology businesses. Retail, fashion, education and finance — same fundamentals, different rules.
-
2015
Laravel & APIs
Moved deep into Laravel. Banking, fintech and health platforms. APIs, billing, and the boring-but-critical parts of scale.
-
2026
Fractional CTO
Now working with founders and teams as their CTO and senior engineer — strategy plus shipping, on the TALL stack.
Solutions
What I'm typically hired to do.
Mid- to large-scale technology projects where strategy, code and business outcomes need to line up.
01
Fractional CTO
Senior technology leadership on demand — strategy, architecture, hiring and delivery oversight without the full-time overhead.
02
Product & Tech Strategy
Align product investment, technical choices and business outcomes — before a single line of code is written.
03
TALL-stack Development
Hands-on Laravel, Livewire, Alpine and Tailwind build work — from greenfield SaaS to high-traffic e-commerce.
04
Technical Audits
Independent reviews of codebases, architecture, security posture and team practices — with a prioritised action list.
05
Platform & API Design
Design and build the platforms, APIs and integrations that other teams build their products on top of.
06
Team Mentoring
Lift the standard of existing engineering teams — code review, pairing, hiring help and senior-level mentorship.
Est. 1997
Have a project that needs a steady hand?
Tell me what you're building — I'll come back with a frank assessment and a path forward.
Start the conversation