The developer who worked at Booking.com before she built websites.

Hospitality was the career before web development was. Six of those years at Booking.com, managing hotel accounts across Portugal — mostly in Lisbon, which was the main market at the time — producing the market analysis the whole team relied on to manage their portfolios, hit their targets, and understand what was actually working for each property. That also meant sitting with hotel owners through the real conversations: their strategies, their challenges, where they were stuck. I helped with things that went beyond what the job technically required. I've always worked that way.

That kind of work gives you a clear view of what separates hotels that grow digitally from ones that stay flat. A lot of it comes down to how they show up online — the speed of the experience, the quality of the content, whether the website actually does a job or just exists. I understood the gap long before I knew how to close it technically.

“I’ve sat in those meetings.”

The shift started with a Shopify store I ran for a few years (The Green Beauty Concept). Instead of hiring someone every time the theme needed changing, I learned to do it myself. When I sold the store, what stayed with me wasn't the retail experience — it was the feeling of actually understanding the thing I'd built. That led to React. Then full-stack. The technical side grew out of a practical instinct, not a career plan.

The first site I built was for Paulo, who runs Farol Discover, a tourism company in the Algarve, and a family friend. What started as “help me with a few emails” turned into a website that now generates 15% of his bookings directly, without paid advertising. That outcome wasn't accidental — it came from understanding his business before opening a code editor.

That's still how every project starts. What does this client's business actually need, not what does a client usually ask for? Strategy before design, design before code. Modern stack because performance and longevity are not optional. Full ownership from day one because dependency is a trap, and I've seen enough businesses fall into it with technology vendors to know it quietly costs them more than they realise.