Skin health content site plus tools for dermatologists. First engineering role, small team, reporting directly to the CEO, so “full stack founding engineer” meant all of it: the public site, the tools the dermatologists used, and the servers underneath.
- Built both sides of the product: the patient-facing site and the platform the medical professionals wrote and reviewed content on.
- Moved hosting to serverless: cut the infrastructure bill about 85%, real runway at a startup that size.
- Rebuilt page rendering: sent finished pages from the server instead of a blank screen waiting on JavaScript, which made the site usable on slow connections, a lot of the audience.
Learnskin
We also spun off a separate company out of this one: Learnskin, which gave dermatologists the continuing education credits they’re required to earn every year through an app to read articles, watch videos, and take a quiz to prove you’d learned something. I built a good chunk of it alongside Dermveda itself.
- The PDF service: certificates and reports were generated by a service on AWS Lambda that invoked an actual compiled binary. This was early enough in Lambda’s life that doing this wasn’t a solved problem yet; Lambda functions were meant to be small, self-contained pieces of code, not a shell around a native binary.
- Why Lambda specifically: our demand was inconsistent, so we ran as much as possible on Lambda instead of paying for always-on servers. Every dollar we didn’t spend on idle hosting was runway: it meant the company stuck around longer, and could afford to pay us more.