The person behind the universe
I'm Jean-Christophe Cuvelier — totophe online, and long enough that the nickname predates anything on this site being a business. I'm a fractional CTO and technical lead based in Brussels. I run Wellmade, a product engineering studio, and I still write the code. Twenty years of building products for companies that wanted the thinking and the building done by the same person.
That last part is the whole thing, really. Most of what goes wrong in software goes wrong in the gap between the people who understand the problem and the people who build the solution. I've spent two decades trying to be in both rooms at once — as a CTO, as an agency MD, embedded in a large corporate, and now running a studio small enough that nobody has to translate for anyone.
This site is where I think out loud. It started in 2003 as a personal blog and has followed me ever since, through the tools I build, the infrastructure I run for the fun of it, the way software teams and organisations actually work, and the occasional detour into writing, music and whatever caught my eye. Twenty-three years deep and still going.
Lately that means how technical knowledge moves through an organisation — or doesn't. Why the person who knows the most is often the reason nobody else does. What actually changes when AI enters real engineering work, as opposed to what gets claimed about it. And, because I can't help myself, the homelab and remote-dev rabbit holes I keep falling into.
There are posts here from 2004 complaining about Safari's CSS bugs. They stay. Not everything I've written still reflects what I think, and the dates are on all of it.
If any of that is your kind of thing, the writing and the topics are the way in.
If you'd rather talk than read: I take on fractional CTO and interim technical leadership work, and I'm always happy to be asked whether something is a good idea before anyone spends money on it. Get in touch through the Wellmade website, or find me on LinkedIn.
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He runs Wellmade, a product engineering studio, and still writes the code. Twenty years of building products for companies that wanted the thinking and the building done by the same person.