I’m Roger Stringer, Product Engineer, Author, and Foodie.

Hey, I'm Roger Stringer, an AI Product Engineer, Writer, Speaker, and Foodie.

I'm an AI Product Engineer, writer, foodie and speaker based in Penticton, British Columbia — and when I'm not at a keyboard, I'm probably in the kitchen, at a campsite, watching a movie with my girlfriend, or hunting down a good comic book.

Outside of work, I'm a dad, a music obsessive, a film buff, and a camper. I share life with my partner Jen and our combined crew of kids, and we spend a lot of our free time cooking, exploring the outdoors in our 1999 Honda Stepwagon, and generally making a mess of things in the best way.

This blog has been running in one form or another since 2003. It's where I write about tech, design, food, and whatever else has my attention. Older posts get cleaned up occasionally — but the archive runs deep.

What I Bring to the Table 💼

Over the past 27 years I've built products with companies of every size — scrappy startups to established enterprises — shipping things that actually scale. For the last few years that work has centered on AI: not the demo-ware kind, but systems that hold up in production and earn their place in a real business.

As an AI Product Engineer, I work backwards from what the product should be, then build it end to end — frontend, backend, infrastructure, and the AI layer woven through all of it. I'm at my best when handed a rough idea and asked to make it real. That means knowing where AI creates genuine leverage and, just as importantly, where it doesn't.

In practice, that shows up as AI automation — integrating AI into the parts of a business where it compounds: lead generation, internal tooling, content pipelines, and the workflows that quietly eat a team's time. My stack here includes Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Hermes, MCP servers, n8n, and LangChain, among others.

And as a Fractional CTO, I step into the technical leadership gap — working with founders and leadership teams to set engineering direction, make the architectural calls, and build the systems and teams that let a company scale without a full-time hire. Defining your stack, leading a migration, hiring your first engineers, or translating business goals into technical reality: the same hands-on approach, one level up.

On the technical side: JavaScript across the board (Astro, React, Datastar, Remix, Next.js, Vue, Nuxt), plus PHP, Rust, Go, and Python — with deep experience in headless architecture (Directus, Strapi, Sanity, WordPress, Shopify) and infrastructure from greenfield to legacy migration.

Additional Projects 🚧

Beyond client work, I stay busy building and writing. I run DataMcFly, where I take on consulting projects and write about development, automation, and AI. I built Chef Brainy, an AI-powered recipe generator that turns ingredients, cooking style, and serving size into a full recipe — you can even pick your favourite chef. And I've authored two editions of the Twilio Cookbook for Packt Publishing.

Colophon 📖

This site is built on Astro and uses Drizzle with postgres as the database layer, Directus as the headless CMS, and deployed on Vercel.

UI is handled using Tailwind with DaisyUI using a custom library I built based on Shadcdn. Then for any Client-side interactivity, I use Datastar - no React, no Alpine, no HTMX - with vanilla JavaScript filling in the gaps in the few places it's needed. All posts and pages are written in Markdown.

For tooling: Cursor handles all my coding and writing, and I live in the terminal via Warp with zsh and Oh My Zsh.

Sponsorship 🙏

If you get value from what I build or write, or just want to support an indie developer, I'd really appreciate it — sponsor me on GitHub ❤️. It means a lot.

Disclaimer 👀

Sometimes, I'll post affiliate links on this site. That means that if you sign up or purchase something I’ve recommended after clicking the link, I’ll make a little bit of money. The presence of an affiliate link does not increase the price you pay for an item, but in some cases it gives you a discount or bonus.

I use every product I recommend unless I’ve noted otherwise.

This site is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.