# Mike Mindel — AI product architect & Python engineer

Combining founder-level product thinking with production AI engineering.

> "I build products, not just software."

- Built and scaled [Wordtracker](https://wordtracker.com)
- Featured in the [Financial Times](https://mikemindel.com/wordtracker-ft-profile)
- 25+ years building software products
- Available immediately
- Creative & technical — fluent in both
- UK remote / onsite

Contact: [mike@mikemindel.com](mailto:mike@mikemindel.com) · [LinkedIn](https://linkedin.com/in/mikemindel)

Founder of: [Wordtracker](https://wordtracker.com), [Webventurer](https://webventurer.com), [Stride](https://getstride.dev), CodeFU.

## About

Senior Python engineer, architect and founder-operator. I co-founded [Wordtracker](https://wordtracker.com) in 1998 and have shipped production software since 2005.

I led its technology from two developers to a team of around 25 and scaled annual turnover roughly 100× over a decade, without ever stepping away from the codebase. The last several months have gone deep into AI/LLM and agent tooling, building working systems rather than reading about them.

I balance the creative and the technical: thinking creatively, technically and critically to reach the right solution, weighing the technical environment, cost and ease of future change. Remote-native, self-directed, available now for contract work.

## Founder track record

Built and scaled Wordtracker into a successful SaaS business. Founded and grew Wordtracker into an internationally recognised keyword research platform serving customers worldwide over 28 years.

Profiled in the **Financial Times** — *"Brothers' fast-track to success is being hot in the pursuit of words…"* ([read the article](https://mikemindel.com/wordtracker-ft-profile)).

Mike is a pioneering figure in search marketing — CEO and co-founder of [Wordtracker](https://wordtracker.com), one of the internet's first commercial keyword research tools. Wordtracker put keyword *research* at the centre of digital marketing and helped kickstart SEO as we know it.

- **Pioneering keyword research** — Wordtracker let SEOs find profitable niches and see exactly how often people searched for specific terms, shifting SEO from guesswork to strategy.
- **Education and evangelism** — gave many talks at industry conferences on technical SEO, content and search algorithms.
- **Industry influence** — through the 2000s and 2010s, collaborated with SEO pioneers such as Aaron Wall of SEO Book and Ken McCarthy of The System Seminar to shape best practices still used today.

## Core skills

### Languages

Core languages I use daily.

- **[Python](https://www.python.org)** — [Pydantic](https://docs.pydantic.dev)
- **Python toolchain** — [uv](https://docs.astral.sh/uv/), [ruff](https://docs.astral.sh/ruff/), [pyright](https://microsoft.github.io/pyright/), [mypy](https://mypy-lang.org), [pytest](https://docs.pytest.org)
- **[TypeScript](https://www.typescriptlang.org)** — typed superset of JavaScript
- **[Bash](https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/)** — shell scripting and automation
- **SQL** — [PostgreSQL](https://www.postgresql.org), [Neon](https://neon.tech)

### Frameworks

Python web frameworks.

- **[Flask](https://flask.palletsprojects.com)** — lightweight WSGI web framework
- **[FastAPI](https://fastapi.tiangolo.com)** — async APIs with type hints

### AI / LLM & agent tooling

Building production AI products.

- **Agentic engineering** — my own methodology, [Stride](https://getstride.dev)
- **[Claude Code](https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code)** — primary agent harness
- **[Codex](https://openai.com/codex/)** — AI coding agent
- **[Gemini CLI](https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli)** — AI coding agent
- **[MCP](https://modelcontextprotocol.io)** — tools and reusable skills
- **[LLM APIs](https://composio.dev/toolkits)** — model integration
- **[Linear](https://linear.app) / Kanban** — delivery workflow

### Full-stack web

Modern React applications.

- **[React](https://react.dev)** — components, semantic markup
- **[Vite](https://vite.dev)** — build tooling
- **[Neon](https://neon.tech)** — PostgreSQL
- **[Drizzle](https://orm.drizzle.team) / [Prisma](https://www.prisma.io)** — ORM
- **[Tailwind](https://tailwindcss.com)** — utility CSS, when needed
- **[shadcn/ui](https://ui.shadcn.com)** — UI components
- **[MDX](https://mdxjs.com)** — content and markup
- **[Clerk](https://clerk.com)** — auth
- **[Stripe](https://stripe.com)** — payments
- **[PostHog](https://posthog.com)** — analytics
- **[Biome](https://biomejs.dev)** — lint and format
- **[Vitest](https://vitest.dev)** — testing

### Data engineering (AWS)

Large-scale data pipelines.

- **[Redshift](https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/)** — warehouse-scale processing
- **[Glue](https://aws.amazon.com/glue/)** — Data Catalog and Crawlers
- **[S3](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/)** — object storage
- **[Athena](https://aws.amazon.com/athena/)** — partitioned querying
- **[CloudWatch](https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/)** — monitoring
- **[IAM](https://aws.amazon.com/iam/) / [VPC](https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/)** — access and networking
- **[PostgreSQL](https://www.postgresql.org)** — relational store
- **[Tortoise](https://tortoise.github.io) / [Peewee](https://docs.peewee-orm.com)** — Python ORMs

### Cloud & infra

Provisioning and deployment.

- **[AWS](https://aws.amazon.com)** — [EC2](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/), [ECS](https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/), [Lambda](https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/), [S3](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/)
- **[Terraform](https://www.terraform.io)** — infrastructure as code
- **[Docker](https://www.docker.com)** — containerisation

### Testing & quality

Confidence before shipping.

- **[pytest](https://docs.pytest.org)** — primary test framework
- **[unittest](https://docs.python.org/3/library/unittest.html)** — standard-library testing
- **[Property-based testing](https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io)** — generative cases with Hypothesis
- **CI/CD** — [GitHub Actions](https://github.com/features/actions), [GitLab CI](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/), [CircleCI](https://circleci.com)

### Architecture & methods

Design for change.

- **API design** — [REST](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/REST), [WebSockets](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebSockets_API), [GraphQL](https://graphql.org)
- **[Convex](https://convex.dev)** — reactive data platform
- **OO design** — [Sandi Metz](https://sandimetz.com/99bottles) flocking rules
- **[Design patterns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design_pattern)** — reusable solutions to recurring problems
- **[Test-driven development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development)** — tests first, then code
- **[Agile development](https://agilemanifesto.org)** — iterative, feedback-driven delivery
- **[SRP](https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/system-design/single-responsibility-in-solid-design-principle/) / atomic commits** — change-friendly code
- **[Docker](https://www.docker.com)** — containerisation
- **[Railway](https://railway.com) / [Upstash](https://upstash.com) / [Neon](https://neon.tech)** — managed hosting
- **[Coolify](https://coolify.io) / [Dokploy](https://dokploy.com)** — self-hosted deploys

### Positioning & product

Turning ambiguous ideas into products.

- **[Positioning](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Positioning-Battle-Your-Mind-Anniversary-ebook/dp/B0013Y1UHO)** — clear, memorable concepts
- **Naming** — names that stick
- **Ries & Trout** — school of positioning

### Ways of working

How I work.

- **Remote** — UK-based, remote-native
- **Async** — self-directed
- **Founder-operator** — ships end-to-end

## Currently exploring

### Orchestration frameworks

Wiring agents and pipelines together.

- **[LangGraph](https://www.langchain.com/langgraph)** — stateful agent graphs
- **[LangChain](https://www.langchain.com)** — LLM application framework
- **[Airflow](https://airflow.apache.org)** — workflow orchestration

### RAG

Retrieval-augmented generation.

- **[LightRAG](https://github.com/HKUDS/LightRAG)** — graph-based retrieval

## GitHub examples

Senior Python engineer — for me it's the art of being a Pythonista. My technical process comes down to two habits: reduce the cost of change, and do the simplest thing that works.

It's the one line I keep coming back to:

> "When faced with two or more alternatives that deliver roughly the same value, take the path that makes future change easier."
> — Andrew Hunt & David Thomas, *The Pragmatic Programmer*

My take on Sandi Metz's [99 Bottles](https://sandimetz.com/99bottles) OO exercise puts that to work: polymorphism instead of conditionals, methods of five lines or fewer, and each class with a single reason to change. The `0`, `1` and `6` cases become subclasses that override only what differs — so a new special case is a new small class, not another branch to thread through.

Sandi Metz's **flocking rules** drive the refactor:

1. Select the things that are most alike — find the most similar cases.
2. Find the smallest difference between them.
3. Make the simplest change that will remove that difference.

Sometimes you need to make small adjustments to make things more alike.

```python
class BottleNumber:
    @classmethod
    def from_number(cls, number):
        return {
            0: BottleNumber0(number),
            1: BottleNumber1(number),
            6: BottleNumber6(number),
        }.get(number, BottleNumber(number))

    def __init__(self, number):
        self.number = number

    def quantity(self):
        return str(self.number)

    def container(self):
        return "bottles"

    def successor(self):
        return BottleNumber.from_number(self.number - 1)

class BottleNumber0(BottleNumber):
    def quantity(self):
        return "no more"

    def successor(self):
        return BottleNumber.from_number(99)
```

[View the full file on GitHub →](https://github.com/webventurer/99bottles/blob/master/src/bottles.py)

More on GitHub:

- **[python-template](https://github.com/webventurer/python-template)** — a Python project template with dependency management, testing, linting and dev tooling preconfigured. Based on [gma/python-template](https://github.com/gma/python-template).
- **[app-starter](https://github.com/webventurer/app-starter)** — a one-command full-stack starter: React and TypeScript with [Hono](https://hono.dev), [Neon](https://neon.tech), [Clerk](https://clerk.com) and [Drizzle](https://orm.drizzle.team).

## Selected experience

### Stride (getstride.dev) — agentic-engineering methodology and tooling, 2026

Built [Stride](https://getstride.dev), an agentic-engineering methodology and tooling that gives AI-assisted development guard rails (traceable, reversible, tied to a Vision) so teams ship AI-built software that lasts past day 30, instead of vibe-coding software that collapses under its own debt. It runs on Claude Code and Linear / Kanban delivery, with atomic commits behind pull requests.

- Presented it in a 25-minute talk, [*"Stop building on quicksand — ship AI apps that last past day 30"*](https://getstride.dev/stop-building-on-quicksand), at the **AI Global Festival** (Suffolk, 2026), arguing against vibe coding and for staged agentic engineering: start with a shared Vision, telegraph work across the team, give agents bounded pieces to deliver, then keep every change reviewable through the board, commits and pull requests.
- The same methodology delivered the smart-glasses spike below: the method in live use on paid client work, not just theory.

### Viability spike — Even Realities smart-glasses integration (contract), 2026

For an early-stage AI startup, ran a fixed-scope two-day go/no-go spike proving a [Convex](https://convex.dev) reactive-database web app could drive [Even Realities G2](https://www.evenrealities.com) smart glasses with real-time two-way sync. Built a test Convex app and demonstrated a clean round trip between the phone's companion app and the glasses lens. Because the client's platform runs on the same reactive database, the result carried straight to it. Delivered remotely and asynchronously with a shared repo and a written findings note. *(Client named on request, subject to NDA.)*

### Wordtracker — co-founder and technology lead, 1998–present

The keyword-research / search-intelligence tool I co-founded with my brother in 1998 and have led the technology for ever since. Financial Times–profiled; scaled ~100× over its first decade and ran profitably at national-press scale.

- **Co-founder & developer, 1998–2013**: the technical half of a two-developer team; the CTO role grew as the team grew, to around 25 at peak.
- **CEO / CTO (dual-hat), Mar 2013 – Jan 2026**: ran the company and owned the technology at once.

**Engineering**

- Wrote the back-end Wordtracker API in **Python (FastAPI)**, serving keyword data to the front end.
- Built and operated cloud data workflows to ingest and analyse large-scale search / clickstream datasets for the keyword-intelligence products.
- Crunched large volumes of clickstream data on **Amazon Redshift** (at cluster level, including VPC / IAM connectivity) from a variety of sources to produce up-to-date Google search volumes; evaluated performance trade-offs vs Postgres.
- Designed a cost-aware "burst + stash" compute approach: spin up a larger Redshift cluster for heavy processing, then move outputs to a smaller, cheaper node for storage and serving.
- Implemented an **AWS Glue + S3 + Athena** workflow for ongoing ingestion / querying of partitioned datasets (year/month/day): crawler setup, schema management, partition-aware querying, and remediation of schema-drift / malformed-file issues.

**Positioning and product**

- Developed and tested positioning concepts such as **"The Keyword Platform"**, framing Wordtracker as a place to bring keyword data together from many sources rather than "just another SEO tool", to sharpen differentiation and guide product and marketing decisions.

### Arrowfile Ltd — director, 1996–2004

Director of the family photographic business in Mill Hill, London, selling photographic albums and storage pages.

## Talks & standup

| Year | Title | Where |
|:-----|:------|:------|
| November 2008 | [Five Powerful Ways to Use Keywords](https://vimeo.com/2675693) | Ken McCarthy's System Seminar |
| June 2017 | [Get Noticed! (The Art of Getting Attention)](https://vimeo.com/221985009) | Spoken-word performance |
| November 2023 | [Spoken word artist](https://vimeo.com/882254652/118ad74b77) | The Red Lion, Eynsham |
| December 2023 | [Spoken word artist](https://vimeo.com/897029104/9291c39017) | The Art House, Southampton |
| 2026 | [Stop building on quicksand — ship AI apps that last past day 30](https://www.getstride.dev/stop-building-on-quicksand) | Talk — AI Global Festival, Suffolk |

## Education

| Years | Institution | Study |
|:------|:------------|:------|
| 1993–1996 | **Reading University** | BA (Hons) Film & Drama, 2:1. |
| 1991–1992 | **Bristol University** | Computer Science & Maths (two terms). |
| 1986–1991 | **Mill Hill School** | A-levels in Economics, Maths, Physics and English Literature; 12 GCSEs, including English, Physics and Computer Studies at grade A. |

## Beyond code

Ran the [Wam Bam Club](https://contact.wambamclub.com/) for 10 years — a West End burlesque cabaret at The Café de Paris (Leicester Square) and The Bloomsbury Ballroom (Holborn); comedy, cabaret and controlled chaos, engineered to leave the room buzzing ([TripAdvisor reviews](https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attraction_Review-g186338-d3786705-Reviews-Wam_Bam_Club-London_England.html)).

Made the horror feature film *[Don't Let Him In](https://vimeo.com/178247503)* (2011) — a nerve-bludgeoning, slow-burning psychological horror/slasher in which a rural weekend getaway turns into a deadly double date when a charming stranger may be the serial killer known as "The Tree Surgeon." Released internationally (incl. US Jan 2012; UK Oct 2012) and sold in major retail (incl. Walmart). A filmmaker too — *[Burning Man | Release!](http://ihippy.me/burning-man-release-is-live/)* (2015).

Across these projects I've worked as a **film editor** — now specialising in AI, with tools like [Seedance 2.5](https://seed.bytedance.com) and [Kling](https://klingai.com) — as well as **camera operator**, **director of photography** and **producer**.

> "Wow. Watching your film now. The music and imagery is SUBLIME brother. Wow. Mediated ecstasy. Love it."
> — Jason Silva, [Shots Of Awe](https://www.youtube.com/user/ShotsOfAwe)

Also created and ran comedy bootcamps in partnership with award-winning comedian **Joe Bor**:

- **[1 Line Wonders](https://www.facebook.com/1linewonders) (Comedy Challenge)** — a one-session taster: complete beginners learn to write original one-liners, workshop them in small groups, then perform live on stage.
- **[5 Minute Wonders](https://www.facebook.com/5minutewonders)** — a multi-week programme taking novices from zero material to a confident five-minute stand-up set, building material and stagecraft week by week, ending in a live showcase.

> "I think 5 Minute Wonders was productive, welcoming, collaborative and inspiring! I bet that doesn't happen too much on the comedy circuit!!"
> — Judy Goldberg

It's the same teach-through-practice pattern that runs through [Stride](https://getstride.dev), in a different medium — the creative track behind the balance of creative and technical I bring to every problem.

## Why you should hire me

Most people can either spot opportunities or build products. I've spent my career doing both.

My advantage isn't just coding or strategy — it's connecting the two. I work across the entire product lifecycle, from understanding the market and positioning an idea through to building, launching and growing the product:

Idea → Positioning → Product → Engineering → Launch → Growth.

## Why hire me? I come with an AI second brain

I run a second brain. It's the [Tiago Forte](https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com) idea: capture what you learn, get it back when you need it, and action it now. I can pull a detail from a conversation months old and use it today.

Wherever I'm working, that's the edge. Work gets done better and faster, with the best knowledge to hand. And I don't keep it to myself. I coach people to set up their own, so this AI-powered way of working spreads through the company and lifts everyone it touches.

I run it on **[Cmux](https://cmux.com/)** and **[Obsidian](https://obsidian.md)**. Cmux holds several second brains at once. Obsidian's where I read them. So I've got multiple knowledge bases, all talking to each other.

So the right knowledge lands just in time, for the exact job in front of me.

I'm AI-native too. I'll run several Claude, Codex and Gemini CLI jobs at once, not one at a time.

For the hard calls I lean on more than one model. OpenRouter's [Fusion](https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/plugins/fusion) fires a prompt at a panel of models in parallel, with web search. A judge weighs the answers, and my model writes a better one off the back of it.

I do the same with documents. Fan one out to several frontier models and pull back a synthesised critique, a build on Karpathy's [llm-council](https://github.com/karpathy/llm-council).

## Industries I'm into

Three spaces I'm involved in and would like to explore further.

- **Trading** — commodities, options, crypto. Markets run on data, and I like building the tools that read it.
- **Marketing** — landing pages, advertising, media buying. I built my own MDX system, `lander`, to keep content and design apart, so a page stays quick to change.
- **Search, AEO and GEO** — the same ground I've worked for 28 years, now shifting to AI answers. I know how people find things, and how that's changing.

## Work I enjoy doing

- **Data analysis** — crunch and analyse large volumes of data to detect patterns ([Redshift](https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/), [BigQuery](https://cloud.google.com/bigquery)).
- **Trading** — writing trading systems.
- **APIs** — writing APIs (FastAPI / Pydantic) which serve valuable data.
- **Creative problems** — solving interesting creative problems, like the two-way sync between Convex and the Even Realities glasses.

## Contract details

- **Availability**: immediately, remote — UK-based.
- **Engagement**: contract or employment, equally welcome. Ideal is part-time — 2 days a week, 3 at most — with room to scale up for the right project.
- **How I work**: remote-native and self-directed. Happy to lead a team of coders and agents, or embed in yours.
- **Experience**: 25+ years shipping production software; Wordtracker co-founder.
- **Invoicing**: through Webventurer Ltd.

## Employment

I'm also available for part-time or full-time employment, as well as contract work.

- **Availability**: immediately.
- **Type**: part-time or full-time.
- **Location**: remote, hybrid or on-site — UK-based.

## Let's talk

Available now for contract work through Webventurer Ltd, or for part-time or full-time employment.

[Email Mike](mailto:mike@mikemindel.com) · [LinkedIn](https://linkedin.com/in/mikemindel)