Ten years of production work in PHP and JavaScript, from database schema to the last pixel of the interface.
For the past decade Petar Baykov has been building web applications end to end, working with a small number of clients each year as the person responsible for the entire stack.
His practice favours boring, durable architecture over novelty — the sort of decisions that still make sense when somebody else opens the repository three years later.
Most of the work sits between product engineering and design, a position he describes as caring how a thing feels as much as how fast it responds.
Previously lead engineer at a small product studio, he now works independently from Sofia, on project and retainer terms.
Editorial site and commerce layer for a contemporary art gallery, with bespoke inventory and consignment handling.
No. 02Search and annotation platform built over a catalogue of four hundred thousand songs.
No. 03Real-time analytics interface for a distributed sensor network of considerable volume.
No. 04Offline-first note-taking application for field researchers, with conflict-free synchronisation.
I work primarily within the PHP and JavaScript ecosystems, with a deliberate bias toward architecture that stays legible under maintenance. The interesting problems in this trade are rarely the technical ones — they are the ones about scope, sequence and restraint.
I would rather spend a day removing a feature than a week building one nobody asked for. Most engagements begin with a conversation about what the thing is actually for, and only then about how it gets built.
Before going independent I led engineering at a small product studio, where I learned that shipping is a discipline rather than an event. These days I take on roughly four projects a year, usually owning the whole picture from data model to interface.
Accepting commissions for the second quarter of 2026.
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