Adam M. Young

Senior Software Engineer at 9fin, building performant, data-heavy applications in Python and React. Outside of work I'm a photographer, a hiker, and an occasional runner.

I care about the boring things that make software good: clear observability, small bundles, accessible interfaces, and clean and maintainable codebases that work at scale.

What I work with

Frontend: React, Next.js (App Router, RSC), TypeScript
Backend: Python, Postgres, Redis, edge/serverless runtimes
Infra: Vercel, Cloudflare, Docker, AWS

TrailWise

2023 — present

Next.js RSC
Postgres
Redis
Mapbox
Vercel
FastAPI
Flutter

TrailWise is a hiking, gear, and social platform for tracking mountain peak summits and trail routes worldwide. It features historical timeline tracking, gear management, trip planning, and social features, as well as offline LLM and smart watch support.

The website is built on Next.js Server Components backed by FastAPI, Postgres and Redis. Mobile is a cross-platform Flutter app, with offline LLM support built on Google's Gemma 4 model. Trailwise also exposes an MCP server so assistants can query your own hiking data.

ByHand

2026 — present

Next.js Cache Components
FastAPI
Postgres
Fly.io
Vercel
Cloudflare R2
Stripe

ByHand is a directory of independent shops where everything is handmade — think Product Hunt for makers. Shops apply with captioned evidence of how their work is made, and a person reviews every application before it goes live. Shoppers browse by craft without an account, and sign in to leave a thumbprint, keep lists, and comment on makers' monthly updates. Makers get their own analytics, and can pay to fast-track review or take a clearly labelled featured stall — neither of which ever touches the ranking.

The storefront is Next.js on Vercel with Cache Components, so every public page is anonymous and cacheable, with per-visitor state fetched on the client. It's backed by FastAPI, SQLAlchemy and Postgres on Fly, with a second, private admin API and review dashboard that have no public IPs at all. A typed client is generated from the API's OpenAPI contract, uploads go straight to Cloudflare R2 with presigned URLs, and every deploy is gated on Playwright journeys and axe accessibility checks.

Photography Portfolio

2022 — present

Next.js
React Three Fiber
three.js
Zustand
Cloudflare R2
Sharp

My photography site, which stopped being a grid and became a building you walk around. Each room is an exhibit: wander the corridor with WASD or a thumbstick, walk up to a piece to read its placard, and leave a heart on the ones you like. There's a minimap that fills in the rooms you've visited, other visitors milling about, angled light shafts from the fixtures overhead, and enough post-processing to make a browser feel like a gallery.

Originals are served from Cloudflare R2 and resized on the fly with Sharp, and the placards are written from each file's own EXIF — so hanging a new picture is a case of uploading it.

Blurdle

2022

Next.js SSR

Blurdle is a daily browser game in the Wordle mould: guess the daily blurred picture in five tries, with the image sharpening on each miss. Score tracking and achievements, rendered server-side so day rollover is honest.

Careers

Seven years of product engineering, mostly front-end-leaning full stack: planning and mapping software, two fintechs, and a payments processor.

9fin

Senior Software Engineer · Nov 2023 — present · London / remote

Python
React
TypeScript
Postgres

9fin is a debt capital markets platform — news, filings and analytics for people who trade credit. I build the data-heavy applications that sit on top of it in Python and React, where the interesting problems are the ones that only show up at scale: query cost, payload size, and keeping a table honest when it's holding tens of thousands of rows. Started as a Software Engineer, promoted to Senior in July 2024.

Checkout.com

Software Engineer · Apr 2022 — Nov 2023 · Remote

Next.js
TypeScript
Tailwind CSS
MDX
Storybook
Vercel

Checkout.com processes payments for a good chunk of the internet, and I worked on the properties around the product rather than the product itself.

I built and shipped the internal component library several of those user-facing products now sit on — TypeScript over Headless UI and Tailwind, documented in Storybook, tested with React Testing Library and Jest. I also rebuilt the docs site end to end in Next.js and Tailwind, which was as much a content problem as a code one: the MDX pipeline had to be something technical writers could work in without asking an engineer. Page refactoring, image and script loading, and a smaller bundle took PageSpeed from the mid-40s to over 90 on most docs pages.

The other half of the job was the marketing site — 600+ pages across six locales on a headless CMS, leaning on Next.js and Vercel to keep it fast wherever it was served from.

Curve

Software Engineer · Jun 2021 — Apr 2022 · London / remote

Gatsby
React
Contentful
CI/CD

Curve puts all of your cards behind one card. I owned the public site, built on Gatsby and Contentful, and led the V2 redesign — which was mostly a bet that making the CMS pleasant to use would get us more out of the marketing team than any amount of new components would. Also partnership builds, faster deploy pipelines, and enough of the developer guidelines that new starters stopped asking me the same questions.

TerraQuest

Software Developer · Jul 2019 — Jun 2021 · Birmingham

React
Gatsby
GraphQL
Azure
styled-system

TerraQuest runs the UK's Planning Portal, which means legacy systems used by every local authority in the country. I worked on the greenfield replacements: Gatsby and GraphQL against a headless CMS, deployed on Azure.

Two things outlasted me there. A set of interactive mapping tools that started as a few-week proof of concept in a small team and went on into production, and the authentication libraries I built on Azure B2C that ended up in most of the internal and external products. The component library I put together in styled-system, from Invision and Zeroheight designs, is still what their apps are built from.

Get in touch

The fastest way to reach me is email. I read everything; I reply to most.

Email: adam@adammyoung.com
GitHub: github.com/AdamMYoung
Twitter / X: @AdamMYoung_
LinkedIn: in/adammichaelyoung

Adam Young — software engineer. Interactive CRT desktop portfolio.