Damon Zhang, full stack developer
I build web software and keep it running.
Senior developer in Auckland. TypeScript, Next.js, Node.js and AWS, from the first spec to production.
- 10+
- years shipping production web applications
- 131
- sites on CloudFront and private S3, about 90 moved stack by stack
- 1,100+
- automated tests behind a rebuilt tax platform
- 13
- releases through preflight, smoke and rollback gates
Selected work
Products I have designed, built and run, and production work for clients.
131/131
hosts verified with edge cache hits after the caching fix
Client work · AWS infrastructure
Cloud migration at scale
About 90 static websites moved off a shared legacy server onto CloudFront with private S3 origins, each provisioned as its own CloudFormation stack with a tested rollback path.
- CloudFront
- S3 + OAC
- CloudFormation
- ACM
778
ad units synced from Google Ad Manager on the first real staging run
Client work · Ad operations SaaS (in UAT)
ADZ Platform
A client's legacy Java ad-operations back office, rebuilt as a multi-tenant Next.js SaaS for publishers, domains, ad units, ad scripts, ads.txt and revenue-share reporting.
- Next.js 16
- Prisma
- PostgreSQL 18
- Google Ad Manager API
301/301
client sites back on HTTPS overnight after a server hardware failure
Client work · Incident recovery
Server recovery
After a client's dedicated server failed and was reinstalled, AI-agent automation I directed brought its static sites back overnight.
- Linux
- Nginx
- Let's Encrypt
- Cloudflare
7
languages across public, member and staff workflows
Church management platform
Aparima
Public, member and staff workflows for households, events, attendance, venue hire, giving and reporting, in 7 languages.
- Next.js 16
- Payload CMS 3
- PostgreSQL
- Vitest
What I can help with
Hands-on work, from a single feature to a whole platform.
Product engineering
Web apps from the first spec to production: data model, auth, billing, multilingual UI and the admin tools behind them.
Next.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL
Cloud & infrastructure
Migrations, caching and access control with a rollback plan for every change, written as code so the next person can run it.
AWS, CloudFormation, Cloudflare, Docker
Automation & AI
Background jobs, data syncs and LLM pipelines that take repetitive work off a team, with logs you can read when something fails.
Node.js, pg-boss, OpenAI API
Smart home & low-voltage
Networking, automation and low-voltage integration for homes and small offices, planned and documented like a software project.
Networking, home automation, cabling
How I ship
AI-assisted, but with the guardrails that keep production boring.
Write it down
Every feature starts as a short written spec: the rules, the edge cases and what done looks like.
Test first where rules matter
Tax, money and permissions get tests before code. The PayTaxNZ tax engine began as 186 golden assertions.
Review independently
AI agents speed up the writing. A separate review pass checks the result before anything is merged.
Release behind gates
Preflight checks, a smoke test and a rollback path on every production release.
Latest writing
All posts- 30 September 2026NearBuild: a watchdog that does not live on the server it watchesEvery NearBuild health check ran on the same server as NearBuild. This is the small AWS Lambda that now watches it from outside: EMF metrics, CloudWatch alarms that treat silence as failure, a least-privilege deploy role, and a drill where I broke it on purpose.
- 29 September 2026NearBuild: turning one council PDF into a searchable mapAuckland Council only publishes resource consent applications as a 300-page PDF. This is how I parse it every hour, keep the data honest, and put it on a map by address.
- 28 September 2026Moving our static sites to CloudFront and private S3, then fixing a $39-a-day request billOne CloudFormation stack per site, byte-level verification, a DNS cutover you can roll back, and the caching mistake behind 94% of our CloudFront requests.