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Forged42
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Forged42 — Stefan’s one-person software practice

I build custom software around how your business actually works — end to end, into production.

Software that fits

I take the domain apart, model the system underneath it, and build the whole thing: interface, rules, data, background work and the production it runs in.

See the work ↓ Write to me

Selected work — 03

Different domains. The same responsibility underneath.

One public product and two production systems. Each case study focuses on the problem, my responsibility, the engineering work and the result.

HealthySkinfluence — my own startup, built as co-founder & CTO

HealthySkinfluence

A pile of skincare research became a live public product: structured articles, products and ingredients, with editorial administration and search behind them.

  • Live at healthyskinfluence.com
  • Editors publish without code changes
  • One search across articles, products and ingredients
Read the case study → Open the live site ↗ Live · Public product
The publicly accessible HealthySkinfluence landing page.

6,000

ingredients connected to 2,000 products and 30 in-depth articles

HealthySkinfluence as it is publicly accessible — captured from the live landing page.

A bus operator running scheduled lanes, rail replacement and multi-day trips — confidential client work

DispoTransPro

A single-user Windows tool became a shared web platform — designed, built and supported solo, in production since February 2024.

  • Solo: discovery, design, build and support
  • 42 buses · 71 drivers · 37 lanes
  • 3,000+ rail-replacement drives in two years
Read the case study → Production · Confidential client work
Editorial still life contrasting one obsolete office computer with a connected field of devices and individual identity cards.

~30

people work in it daily — five back office, twenty-five drivers

From a queue around one machine to individual access across a shared web application.

wige SOLUTIONS GmbH & Co. KG — enterprise media platform, as employed lead developer & architect

Atmosphere Media Cloud

A mature production platform keeps evolving: architecture, hands-on implementation and progressive modernization while media organizations rely on it.

  • Lead developer & lead architect
  • Team of three developers + QA, led hands-on
  • New Nuxt foundation introduced while live
Read the case study → Production · Professional work
Editorial architectural model with a continuous media ribbon moving through overlapping established and new layers.

2

years in production, actively developed and modernized

Modernization as continuity: new layers are introduced while the live product keeps moving.

“I came to Stefan with an idea and a pile of skincare research. He turned it into a real product — structured, searchable and ready for editors. He owns problems end to end, and it shows.”
Ivana Vrhovec · Co-founder & CEO, HealthySkinfluence

What I am usually called in for

The problems that do not have a product you can buy.

If any of these describe your situation, we are probably talking about the same kind of work.

  • Spreadsheets and repeated manual steps holding a critical workflow together.
  • Business rules too complicated for any off-the-shelf product to represent.
  • Planning and scheduling that must respect availability, restrictions and conflicts.
  • Access control done properly — roles, granular permissions and an audit trail.
  • Large files handled end to end: uploads, previews, transcoding — out of sight.
  • A production problem crossing application, database, search, queue and deployment boundaries.

Capabilities

Broad, but not thin.

I work across the complete product. Not a little of everything — enough of each part to be responsible for how they fit together.

Product & domain

Understanding the work

  • Product and requirements discovery
  • Workflow and domain modelling
  • UX for complex operational interfaces
  • Making implicit business rules explicit

Application

Building the system

  • Frontend application development
  • Backend architecture and APIs
  • Authentication, roles and granular permissions
  • Relational data modelling and safe migrations

Systems

Everything behind the screen

  • Search, filtering and information discovery
  • Queues, background processing and real-time updates
  • File uploads, media processing and video workflows
  • Analytics and operational visibility

Operation

Keeping it running

  • Automated testing
  • Accessibility and performance
  • Deployment and production diagnostics
  • Gradual modernisation of existing systems

Stack

I choose technology around the problem. Laravel, Vue and Nuxt are where I am fastest and most certain, but you are hiring someone to solve the system — not to install a preferred framework.

Where I place my bets

LaravelVueNuxtTypeScriptPostgreSQLTailwind CSS
Language & framework
PHPLaravelJavaScriptTypeScript
Interface
Vue 3Nuxt 4InertiaTailwind CSSNuxt UIFilament
Data
PostgreSQLMySQLRelational modellingSafe migrations
API & access
REST APIsLaravel SanctumRoles & permissions
Async & real-time
RedisQueuesJob monitoringReal-time updatesEchoPusher
Search
TypesenseMeilisearchLaravel Scout
Media
FFmpegVideo.jsVideo playbackHLSChunked uploadsS3-compatible & NAS storage
Infrastructure
DockerLaravel SailLaravel CloudForgeCloudflarePM2
Verification
PestPHPUnitVitestPlaywrightAccessibility testingLighthouse

Applied AI

From conventional full-stack products to AI-enabled and agentic systems.

I build custom applications that can be enriched with AI — or designed around it from the beginning.

I integrate AI into real products and business workflows — not as a decorative add-on but as a useful part of the system. Custom software can do more than store information: it can help people understand it, retrieve it and act on it.

That means thinking past isolated prompts and chat windows. An agent is only trustworthy inside an application when it operates through structured, permission-aware tools: what a model may see is what the user may see, and what it may do is what the user may do. Otherwise it is a liability wearing a helpful face.

I am precise about what is shipped and what is designed. The structured tool layers and job infrastructure such agents act through are in production today; the full agent loop is a reference architecture I have designed and reach for when a client needs it. Either way, the engineering is the same: model the domain, expose tools worth using, and fence the agent in before you let it act.

  • AI agents with controlled tool use
  • Agent SDKs and structured outputs on Laravel
  • Media-intelligence pipelines: transcription, vision semantics, embeddings
  • Vector search over business content
  • Permission-aware AI by design
  • AI-assisted automation inside existing workflows
Agent loop with controlled tool useA workflow feeds a goal to an agent. The agent can only reach tools through a permission gate that enforces what the user may see and do. Tool results flow back to the agent until the goal is met.
The loop I build for: agents that act through tools a system deliberately exposes, fenced in by the same permissions as their human users.

One controlled exchange

A representative trace from the class of systems I build — every action stays within what the requesting user may do.

  1. user

    “Cut a thirty-second highlight from this raw cut and put it in my review channel.”

  2. agent

    Plans: needs clip boundaries, render rights and write access to one channel.

  3. tool

    clips.list(rawCut) → 4 candidate segments returned.

  4. guard

    render.create → allowed: this user may edit this asset. Channel write scope granted.

  5. tool

    render.clip(00:12 – 00:42) → job queued; progress streams back live.

  6. agent

    “Highlight rendered and published to your review channel.” Every step stayed inside the user’s own permissions.

Approach

From the business to production, in that order.

These are stages, not a menu. Each one is cheap only if the one before it was done properly.

  1. 01

    Understand

    I learn the domain before I design anything: the vocabulary, the exceptions, who decides what, and which of your current rules are real rules rather than habits nobody has questioned.

  2. 02

    Model

    Then the system underneath: entities, relationships, states and the constraints that must always hold. Getting this right is what makes everything after it cheap.

  3. 03

    Build

    Interface, backend, data and background work as one piece of engineering, delivered in slices you can use and react to early rather than after one long silence.

  4. 04

    Verify

    Automated tests where they earn their keep, plus accessibility and performance checks. The point is not a green badge; it is being able to change the system next year without fear.

  5. 05

    Operate

    Deployment, monitoring and diagnosing the problems that only appear in production. Software is not finished when it ships. It is finished when it runs well.

Working with me

Three steps from first call to running software.

No sales process. We start with your workflow and let the scope follow from understanding.

01

Scoping conversation

You describe the work and the mess around it. I tell you honestly whether I am the right fit, what the risks are and roughly what it would take. Free, and without obligation.

02

Discovery sprint

A paid, bounded engagement: I learn your domain hands-on and model the system underneath it — entities, states, rules and constraints. You receive a concrete architecture and a realistic plan that is yours to keep, whoever builds it.

03

Build & operate

Delivery in slices you can actually use, verified as we go and deployed early. After launch I stay responsible — monitoring, diagnosing and improving from real usage.

Start with a conversation →

Who you would be working with

One engineer, the whole system.

Portrait of Stefan, the engineer behind Forged42.
Stefan, Mühldorf am Inn — the engineer who answers the email.

I am Stefan. Forged42 is my one-person practice — you work directly with the engineer who carries your problem from the first conversation to the production it runs in. Alongside my own clients, I am co-founder and CTO of a skincare publishing startup, the engineer behind a transportation dispatch platform in daily operation since 2024, and lead developer and architect on an enterprise media platform.

I started writing software six years ago through a bootcamp, because I wanted to build things but could not see where to begin. The first application I shipped felt like magic. It still does — and with AI in the loop, shipping has never been more fun. Since then I have followed features from unclear business problems all the way to schema, rules, interface, tests and servers, across industries that share nothing except this: each had to be understood before it could be built.

I care about reliability and clarity, and about being direct with people about trade-offs. The goal is software that fits the work, survives change and remains understandable to the people who inherit it.

Based in
Mühldorf am Inn, Germany
Working languages
German, English, Croatian
Writing software since
2020
Core stack
Laravel, Vue and Nuxt

Contact

Have a workflow that does not fit off-the-shelf software?

Tell me what needs to change. I’ll tell you honestly whether I’m the right fit, then we can agree on scope, timing and the right working model.

stefan@forged42.de

Open to selected custom-software and consulting engagements. Scope, timing and the right working model are agreed directly.

Working languages
German, English, Croatian
Focus
Custom full-stack product engineering