E-commerce and Shopify
Stores, custom storefront components and the checkout, inventory and marketing integrations behind them.
Recent work
Fractional CTO · Hands-on technical lead · 20+ years
Your technical lead.Without the full-time hire.
Your business runs on software, and it deserves an experienced hand on it. I help set the technical direction, write the code, and keep it running, so problems get caught before they become emergencies. Senior judgement for a fraction of a full-time salary, and I don't hand you a strategy deck and leave.
Direction · Delivery · Accountability
Founder
Sales
CTOVacant · $200K+/yr
Derrick GriggTechnical Lead
Operations
Developers✓
Agency✓
AI tools✓
⚠ Nobody owns the tech✓ Owned: roadmap, code, uptime
AI + 20 years of experience
One experienced lead. The output of a team.
A serious build used to mean an architect, front-end and back-end developers, a tester and someone on DevOps, plus the meetings to keep them all pointed in the right direction.
AI now does a lot of that work. What it can't do is decide what's worth building, notice when it's wrong, or answer for the result. Twenty years of building and running software is what makes it fast and right. You get the output of a team, at a fraction of the cost.
A few years ago
- Planning
- Front-end
- Back-end
- Testing
- DevOps
- Review
A team of six · months
Today
DGDerrick GriggDirects the AI, reviews every line, owns the result
- PlanningMe
- Front-endAI
- Back-endAI
- TestingAI
- DevOpsAI
- ReviewMe
One lead · weeks
What you get
Experience you can lean on.
Twenty years of building, fixing and running software for businesses of every size. Here's what that looks like when you work with me.
- →Clear communicationPlain-English updates, no jargon, and you always know where things stand.
- →Complex problems, broken downBig, messy problems turned into clear steps and solutions built to last.
- →The right questionsI'm not afraid to ask the awkward questions, and I dig until I find the right answer, not just the quick one.
- →20+ years, many technologiesPHP to React, content management systems to custom apps, Shopify to SMS. I've seen what works and what doesn't.
- →Technology that fits togetherPlatforms, tools and AI blended into one system that works for your business.
- →Focused on your goalsEvery technical decision ties back to what the business is trying to achieve.
Not an advisor. Not just a coder.
The one person who sees the whole picture.
A strategist who can't build hands you a plan. A developer who doesn't think about the business hands you tickets. You need one person who does both, and who still answers when you call in year three.
Direction
- →A roadmap that matches the business, not the backlog
- →Architecture, build-vs-buy, hosting and vendor decisions
- →Where AI actually pays off, and where it doesn't
- →A second opinion on every quote before you sign it
- →Sitting in on developer hiring
Delivery
- →I write the code. Laravel, Craft CMS, Shopify, JavaScript
- →I review what other developers, and AI, produce
- →Security patches, upgrades, monitoring and backups
- →Documentation, so the knowledge lives in the repo and not in my head
- →The call at 11pm when something breaks
Most fractional CTOs advise.I also ship results.
Don't take my word for it
What clients say.
Most of my clients have been with me for years. That's the point. The longer I'm in the loop, the better I know your business, and the better the advice and the work become.
The best developers ask ‘why’ before ‘how’, and they solve the problem you actually have, not just the one you described. Derrick surfaces problems early, flags tradeoffs and makes complexity look simple. We’ve worked with a lot of vendors, and he’s the smoothest developer we’ve had. After 10+ years together, we’re already planning our next project.
Having Derrick as a developer has been a game changer for us. He continually gets our projects done to perfection and on time. With our site being a critical resource for over 950,000 manufacturing and distribution businesses, we couldn’t afford any missteps. We’re thrilled with the results and couldn’t recommend more highly!
We hired Derrick on contract to complete a web application project for one of our clients. Timelines were extremely tight, but Derrick was always calm under pressure and came through for us in a huge way. His attention to detail, flawless execution, and depth of knowledge in front- and back-end web development are only a few of many of Derrick's strengths.
Not all the skills we need can be brought in-house. Sometimes we have to hire contractors. Generally, I view this as a necessary evil. However, in Derrick's case, it was a great experience. He not only had the knowledge and skills, but understood what we needed and got it done.
Derrick's smart contributions to the project, his willingness and ability to use our processes, and his openness to feedback were all incredibly important to getting it over the finish line. I specifically appreciated how he was able to think creatively about how to solve the problems at hand. The client is very happy and they started getting real sales this week.
Derrick is a wealth of information! Not only is he incredibly communicative but deeply analytical, technologically skilled and does immense topic research. I am pleased and proud to have worked with Derrick as I gained personal knowledge through this experience. Highly recommend as he is someone you can speak with on a practical level to get positive results.
Simple, monthly
A tech lead on retainer.
Where most clients start
Steady
You have a product. It needs a steady hand and regular improvement.
- →Architecture and vendor calls
- →Code review on the work that matters
- →Small and medium builds: features, fixes and integrations
- →Maintenance, security and upgrades
- →Monthly roadmap session
$7,500/mo
Everything in Steady, plus
Growth
You're building something big. You need a lead for the whole cycle.
- →Larger builds and multi-month projects, start to finish
- →Planning: scoping, estimates and release plans
- →Leading your developers and agencies
- →On-call coverage for incidents
- →Priority support, same-day responses
$12,500/mo
Custom project
One-off
A custom project that needs a highly skilled developer to deliver it.
- →Review of project requirements and scope
- →Regular check-ins, matched to the project cadence
- →Codebase built to industry best practices for usability, performance and security
- →Full documentation of the codebase and integrations
TBD
Monthly, never hourly invoices. Pause or cancel with 30 days' notice. I take on a handful of clients at a time, so every client gets my full attention, not whatever time is left over.
Questions about time, response or contracts? Read the FAQ.
Book a callWhere I come in
The kind of work I take on.
Replatforming without losing SEO
Moving years of content to a modern platform without breaking a single URL or the rankings it took a decade to earn.
Recent work
Custom integrations and tools
Payments, SMS, reporting dashboards and APIs: the pieces off-the-shelf software doesn't quite cover.
Recent work
Fixing and tuning existing builds
Bugs, slow pages and code someone else started. I find what's wrong, fix it, and leave it easier to work on.
Recent work
White-label work for agencies
Your agency sells it, I build it, under your name, from scoping to launch to the year after.
Recent work
All KindsFirstbornDDB
Who have I worked with?
Brands that couldn't afford to get it wrong.
Straight answers
Questions people ask first.
With a free 30-minute call. Tell me what you're running and where it hurts, and I'll tell you honestly whether you need a tech lead, a one-off project or nothing at all. If it's a fit, we start the first month right away. The first couple of weeks go to learning your code, hosting and vendors, and you get a written read on what I find.
However your team already works: email, Slack, or a shared board like Trello or Linear. Everything goes into one prioritized list that we agree on together, and you can reshuffle it any time. Small fixes usually ship within a few days. Bigger work gets scoped first and broken into pieces, so you always know what's in progress, what's next and roughly when it lands. On Growth, more than one thing moves at a time.
Each plan comes with a rough monthly allotment: about 5 days a month on Steady and about 10 on Growth. It's a guide, not a stopwatch. There are no timesheets to argue over, and busy months and quiet months even out.
On Steady, within one business day, and usually sooner. On Growth, usually the same day, because I'm working in your team most of the week. Anything urgent on Growth goes straight to me on call. You won't be left wondering whether your message landed.
On Growth I'm on call for incidents. Steady is business hours, with answers within a business day. Either way, part of the job is making 11pm calls rarer: monitoring, backups and upgrades that happen before they're urgent.
Yes, and often that's the point. I can set direction and review the work of an in-house team or an agency, or lead them day to day on Growth. If you don't have anyone, I do the building myself.
You do, always. Everything lives in your accounts: your repo, your hosting, your domains, your vendor logins. It's documented and built in plain, conventional code, so any good developer could pick it up if I were hit by a bus.
Laravel, Craft CMS, Shopify, React and modern JavaScript, plus AI built on your own data with tools like Claude, OpenAI and pgvector. If your stack is something else, I'll tell you on the first call whether I'm the right person.
It's month to month. Pause or cancel with 30 days' notice. If it's not working, neither of us should be stuck.
30 minutes, no pitch deck
Tell me where your tech is holding you back.
Half an hour, no slides, no hard sell. Whether you need a tech lead, a one-off project or nothing at all, you'll leave knowing which.
- 01You tell me what you're running and where it hurts.
- 02I ask the awkward questions nobody else has.
- 03You get a straight answer, even if it's not me.
