Adventurous Programmer · Columbus, OH
adam pasternack
Fractional CTO & Technical Co-Founder
Twenty years of shipping software inside banks, insurers and restaurant chains — now pointed at founders who need the technical judgment of a CTO without the headcount of one.
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What I get hired for
- 01
Fractional CTO
Technical strategy, architecture decisions and hiring judgment for teams that need a senior head in the room but not a full-time salary against it.
- 02
Technical co-founder
The deeper version: I take ownership of the product's technical direction and build the first system alongside you, not for you.
- 03
Custom app dev & workflows
Web and mobile products end to end, plus the internal workflows and integrations that quietly decide whether a business scales or stalls.
- 04
Data pipelines & ML ops
Moving data reliably, then putting models into production and keeping them there — the part most teams underestimate.
- 05
Cybersecurity & compliance
Building for the audit you'll face later. Regulated-industry habits applied before they become an emergency.
- 06
Software that pays for itself
I find the manual process that's quietly expensive, or the revenue you're leaving on the table, and build the thing that closes the gap. We agree the numbers that matter before I start — and on the right engagements, my fee is tied to moving them.
Most engagements start with a short assessment and a written recommendation you can act on with or without me.
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Selected work
Products used by millions of people, built inside organizations where being wrong is expensive.
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Fidelity
Principal Lead Engineer · Virtual Assistant
Personalized, proactive insights delivered on the portfolio summary page and across Fidelity's Virtual Assistant, voice and digital channels — a single API surface spanning service layer, middleware and front end.
TypeScript · React · GraphQL · AWS
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Hagerty
Engineering Manager & Tech Lead · Mobile
The Hagerty mobile app for collector-car owners — Drivers Club membership, insurance ID cards and in-app roadside assistance — plus the serverless middleware behind it. Led nine engineers and a contractor team through build and handover.
Dart/Flutter · AWS Lambda · DynamoDB · AppSync · Terraform
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Bold Penguin × Nationwide
Senior Software Engineer · Nationwide lead
Nationwide's white-labeled commercial insurance quoting flow on Bold Penguin's agent marketplace, shipped end to end on the front end. Took Commercial Auto from idea to launch in three months and led the first fully automated Excess & Surplus quote experience.
Angular · RxJS · StencilJS · Redux · Nx
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Wendy's
Consultant · 90° Innovation Lab
The whole ecommerce surface for the quick-service chain: React web apps, native mobile apps, and the in-store ordering kiosk — packaged with NodeWebkit to run on Windows hardware. Then an end-to-end analytics implementation tracking the full customer journey, feeding personalization and segmentation.
React · Native mobile · NodeWebkit · Analytics
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Huntington National Bank
Software Engineer · Online Account Origination
The digital account-opening flow — the first thing a new customer touches, and the place where regulatory requirements and conversion rate argue with each other most.
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College Board
PowerFAIDS · AP / SAT / PSAT score processing
PowerFAIDS, the financial aid management platform more than 600 institutions use to run aid packaging, compliance and federal reporting — and the pipelines that process AP, SAT and PSAT scores at national exam volume.
~/how-i-work
How I work
Fractional means part-time attention, not part-time ownership. Here is the shape of it.
Two weeks to a real opinion
I read the code, talk to whoever is building it, and come back with a written assessment: what will break first, what is fine and being worried about anyway, and what I would do in what order. You own that document whether or not we keep going.
A weekly rhythm, not a ticket queue
Standing time with you and with the team. Architecture decisions get made and written down. Hiring gets a second opinion from someone who has interviewed a few hundred engineers. Vendors get a technical read before you sign.
I still write code
Enough to stay honest about what I'm asking of your team, and enough to unblock the hard part myself when the hard part is the whole problem. AI-assisted where it earns its place — which is more places than most teams are using it, and fewer than the vendors claim.
The goal is to become unnecessary
A system your team can run without me, documented decisions they can argue with, and a first engineering hire who can take the seat. If I'm still essential in year two, I did it wrong.
~/contact
Tell me what's breaking.
Or what you're trying to build, or the decision you keep going back and forth on. First conversation is free and usually useful on its own.
adam@adventurousprogrammer.comColumbus, Ohio · working with founders anywhere