Plate VII

The gardener

Constantinus Chirila · perennial, hardy · british/romanian

Engraved portrait of Constantin Chirila

The author, observed from life

I'm Constantin, a Romanian-born British front-end engineer with a designer's background. I started in design and illustration over a decade ago, moved into engineering, and have spent 10+ years building interfaces for the web: mostly in React and TypeScript, always with an eye for how the thing feels to use.

Design is still where I think from, so I care about the details most people only notice when they're missing. When a project needs more than the front-end, I build the backend and APIs to run it too, which means I can take an app from first sketch to something running. What I leave behind is clean, documented code a team can own without me in the room.

Clarity over clevernessCode and decisions a future team can read cold.
Own it end to endFrom the first sketch to the thing running in production.
Write it downEvery trade-off documented; nothing lives only in my head.
Grow it to lastFoundations before flourishes, so the software is still standing in five years.