I'm Rob, a fullstack developer with 15 years of experience building Vue and Laravel applications, including many MVPs for early stage startups. With the advent of agentic coding I have shifted to a more spec driven "flows" based workflow. This cuts development time and cost on any project. For MVPs in particular, combined with my Starters, it takes an idea to a live app in weeks rather than months.
You can also find me on Upwork, where I'm Top Rated Plus with 100% job success and over $100k billed across multiple clients. Worth a look if you want an outside read before getting in touch.
Currently available for freelance and contract work. Whether you need an MVP built, help specing out a budget and timeline, or just have questions about the open source code and the flows workflow, get in touch at .
Then the Starters are for you. An open source Vue SPA app and admin with a Laravel API behind them, where authentication, account management, billing and subscriptions, roles and permissions, notifications and localization are already built and tested. The work starts on the part that makes your product different, and since I wrote them there is no ramp up time.
The flows, app and API repos are all open source, and the live app and admin demos run on the API, so you can see exactly what you are getting before hiring anyone. The Starters page goes into more detail on the workflow.
Happy to jump on a call first and talk through what you are building. From there I can come back with a birds eye view of the scope and whether the Starters are the right fit for it.
Flows driven development is nothing new, but agentic coding has pushed it front and center. Agents handle the majority of the coding, but they still need to be told what to code. The clearer the instructions and edge cases, the better the result and the less AI slop you get back.
The fundamental rule is that AI works better when you tell it what to do, not when it tells you how to do it. So it starts with requirements, then working through the flow, whether that's a system flow, a user flow or an architectural diagram. Mermaid diagrams visualize the edge cases and the more complicated parts. The flows themselves are built with the agents. They then get fed back in from the code side, where existing code is compared against the flow and the missing pieces get built out.
The spec is not a throwaway planning document either. It stays live next to the code as the source of truth and the documentation for the project, so anyone joining later has a detailed and current description of how everything is meant to work. The full breakdown of the workflow is on the Starters page.
Yes. I've joined many existing projects over the years alongside building MVPs. On a more recent project I introduced the flows based approach to streamline development between the client, designers and developers. I work fullstack, or in a dedicated back end or front end role.
Yes, I'm fine to jump in and start collaborating with an existing team. Over the years about half my work has been solo, most of that building an initial MVP, and the other half in small teams alongside designers and other developers. Bringing flows into an existing project is straightforward if the team is interested, but it's not a requirement for working together.
Yes. Not every project needs another pair of hands writing code. If you want a second opinion on an architecture, help getting requirements and flows written down, or a sanity check on a timeline before you commit to it, that works as a standalone engagement on the same hourly basis. Happy to jump on a call first either way.
I'm open to a set contract amount, a fixed monthly for example, and have worked that way before. Primarily though I work hourly, billed weekly, which over the years has turned out to be the most flexible arrangement for both sides.
For an MVP it starts with a free consultation, a couple of hours to work through the requirements and get a birds eye view of the features and what the build involves. That is usually enough to tell whether it is worth going further.
From there the first milestone is a detailed spec in flows, plus a basic deploy of the Starters with your logo and colors in place, typically $200 to $400 USD. That is where the real timeline and budget come from, and you have something running to look at before either of us commits to anything longer.
My rate typically depends on my availability, the length of the engagement and current market rates. Happy to have a quick call to talk it through, or just shoot me an email and I'll get back to you.
Yes. Happy to run the whole thing through Upwork if you would rather have escrow, tracked hours and the paperwork handled for you. If we first spoke on Upwork then we will keep it there regardless, and if you came here directly it is whatever suits you.
Whether or not you want to go the flows route, we start by getting the requirements and features down as clearly as we can. From there it breaks into milestones of about a week each, so the budget and timeline come out of something concrete rather than a number pulled out of a first conversation.
Send over a rough outline of what you are working on. From there we settle the requirements (via flows or not), which is usually enough to come back with scope, budget and a timeline. On an MVP the initial deploy of the Starters can run in parallel, so there is something live early on.
No, writing it is part of the work. It is normal to not know exactly how an app should go, and specing is what forces the scenarios out into the open. If there are a few directions worth considering, we can spec each one and compare them before any code is written.
This is why I lean on the flows approach. The specing and the decisions behind it stay documented as the work happens, so the repo goes with the project. Anyone picking it up gets the full picture on top of a codebase built to a documented structure, which makes onboarding new developers much smoother.
Both are mature, well documented and backed by large communities, which matters more than ever now that AI tooling is writing against them. Vue 3 had a rough transition but has long since settled into a stable ecosystem, and Laravel has more than a decade behind it along with first party cloud services for hosting, queues and deployment.