Re: Software Engineer · Novato, California
I built the cover letter.
The site you have been reading is a concept rebuild of apparent.com, made by one person over one working session, as an application for your Software Engineer opening. This page is the rest of it.
To whoever opens this —
Your origin story ends on a sentence I have not stopped thinking about: managing reactive power with active energy. I read the rest of the site the way anyone reads a website. Then I hit that line and went back to the top.
Here is why it landed. I spent nine years as co-founder and COO of Gold Rush Energy Solutions, a California solar installer. We put roughly 40 MW in the ground and did $130M in lifetime sales before I exited in 2024. For most of those years I was the person on the phone when an interconnection stalled, when a utility changed a rule, when a system was producing and the meter disagreed. I learned what reactive power was because it was costing my customers money.
Then I did the less common half. I taught myself to write software by building the tools that company needed, and eventually built BriteBuild — a multi-tenant platform for the solar industry — solo, in fourteen months, 722 commits and 291 PostgreSQL migrations from a thin calculator to the system EPCs ran their businesses on. It sold this year.
So when your posting asks for someone with “experience or interest in solar power and energy storage systems” who can also “work with energy control algorithms” — that is an unusual pair to ask for, and it happens to be the exact pair I am. Rather than assert it, I built you this.
The part that matters is the console on the home page. A 2 MW array, 2 MWh of storage and a commercial load on a Novato feeder, with a dispatch state machine and an IEEE 1547-2018 volt-var loop running four times a second on a fixed timestep, deliberately decoupled from the display refresh rate. It is not a video. Switch reactive support off and the building’s 0.92 lagging load drags the feeder below the ANSI C84.1 band; switch it on and the inverter injects vars to hold the voltage up while still charging the battery from the array’s surplus. Reactive power managed with active energy, in a browser tab, because that is where I could put it.
The REMI page exposes the same simulation over a SunSpec-shaped
Modbus register map, because an interface is not real until something can talk to it.
Read a block, write a voltage setpoint, try to write a read-only register and get an 0x02 back.
There are 86 tests underneath all of it, and one of them earned its keep during the build. I had fudged the feeder impedance to a round number, and the test asserting that the volt-var toggle should move the voltage materially failed. Without it I would have shipped a demonstration that looked convincing and was wrong. I fixed the physics rather than the assertion. That habit is the thing I would actually bring to a team that controls real power electronics.
What I am not: I have not worked inside your codebase, I do not know your hardware, and I would expect a genuine ramp on both. I have used Wireshark to chase problems, not as a daily instrument. My controls background is self-taught and applied, not academic. I would rather say all of that here than have you discover it in week three.
What I would want to do is the least glamorous and most useful thing available: learn the loop that is actually running in the field, find the class of bug that keeps coming back, and write the documentation the next engineer needs. I am in Placerville, and I will make whatever on-site cadence the role needs work.
The résumé is below and it prints cleanly to a PDF. Though I suspect you have already learned more from the toggle on the home page than you will from it.
— Daniel Ramirez
The posting, line by line
Every requirement, against evidence.
Where the evidence is something on this site, the link goes to the working thing rather than to a description of it.
Experience or interest in solar power and energy storage systems
Nine years as co-founder and COO of Gold Rush Energy Solutions — 40 MW installed, $130M in lifetime sales, 49th largest solar installer in California. Exited 2024. Then built BriteBuild, the platform EPCs in that industry run on, and sold it.
Works with energy control algorithms to control energy production and storage
The dispatch state machine and IEEE 1547-2018 volt-var loop running on this site. Charge-from-surplus, peak shave, export-limit curtailment, state-of-charge reserve floor, slew-rate limiting, and PI voltage regulation with conditional-integration anti-windup.
Watch it runUnderstand communications protocols such as TCP/IP, Modbus
A SunSpec-shaped Modbus holding-register map over the live plant: FC03 and FC06, big-endian 32-bit register pairs, signed scale factors, and real exception codes for illegal addresses and read-only writes.
Read and write the registersSoftware design and development in a test-driven environment
86 unit tests over the control law, the complex-power algebra, the plant model and the Modbus codec. One of them caught a real defect while this site was being built: a fudged feeder impedance that made the voltage barely respond to reactive power. The physics got fixed, not the assertion.
What the tests coverKnowledge of coding languages (Python, JavaScript)
TypeScript and Python daily. This site is TypeScript end to end; the scrape and image pipeline behind it is Python. BriteBuild was ~479k insertions of TypeScript; Breakfast Ball adds 11.7k lines of Swift on top of 137k of TypeScript.
High level of knowledge of Linux operating systems
Production Linux for BriteBuild and Strategy Labs client work — deployment, systemd services, networking, on-prem GPU inference boxes running CUDA. Daily driver is a Unix shell either way.
Experience with databases and Object-Relational Mapping (ORM)
291+ PostgreSQL migrations shipped on BriteBuild alone, including bitemporal history tables and row-level security. Currently running expand-before-contract migrations against a live production Postgres with staging-first discipline.
Integrate external libraries and third-party hardware into the code base
Authored a Capacitor plugin, integrated HealthKit, CoreLocation, WatchConnectivity and ActivityKit across four Apple targets, and shipped Rust compiled to WebAssembly inside a web app.
Troubleshoot, debug and upgrade existing software · root cause analysis
Drove a monorepo from 1,530 svelte-check warnings to zero and kept it there. Run a standing production error-triage loop across Sentry and Postgres logs that root-causes issues and ships the fix with a regression test.
Familiarity with source code repositories such as Git
722 commits on BriteBuild in fourteen months, solo. Branch-per-feature with a gated CI archive; main is a release branch that auto-ships to TestFlight and Cloudflare on green.
Create technical documentation for reference and reporting
The source for this site is the sample. The control law, the anti-windup rationale, the scale-factor sign convention and the reason the loop is not on requestAnimationFrame are all documented where the code is, for the next person.
Excellent communication skills · Agile methodologies
Built and ran a 70-person sales organisation from zero. Serve as Vice President and Secretary of a food co-op board that bought its own building for $1.39M, which means writing the minutes that have to hold up legally.
Résumé
Daniel Ramirez
Placerville, California · daniel@strategylabs.io
Strategy Labs AI
Founder
2024 — present
AI-native technology consulting. Agent orchestration, on-prem inference, and full-stack delivery for clients. BriteBuild was the first engagement and it ended in an acquisition.
- Agent systems · on-prem inference
- Full-stack delivery
- Founded the year of the Gold Rush exit
BriteBuild
Creator · sole engineer
2025 — 2026 · sold
A multi-tenant operating system for the solar industry: CRM, system design, pricing, financing, contracts, scheduling and contractor operations. Built solo in fourteen months, from a thin calculator to the platform EPCs ran their businesses on. Sold to ShimmerWorks Inc.
- 722 commits
- 291+ PostgreSQL migrations
- 479k insertions
- 1,530 → 0 type warnings
Gold Rush Energy Solutions
Co-founder · Chief Operating Officer
2015 — 2024 · exited
Co-founded and ran a residential and commercial solar installer for nine years. Built the sales organisation from zero to seventy representatives plus a national dealer network. Four-time "Best Solar Company" winner; 49th largest installer in California. Taught myself to code by building the tools the company needed.
- 40 MW installed
- $130M lifetime sales
- $30M+ peak year
- 70-rep organisation built from zero
Breakfast Ball
Creator
2025 — present · TestFlight
A native iOS and watchOS golf application with a wager settlement engine that resolves nine side games at once. Live Activities on the lock screen, SwiftUI on the wrist, Supabase realtime and a conflict-resolving sync layer underneath.
- 4 Apple targets
- 137k LOC TypeScript
- 11.7k LOC Swift
- 188 tests
Placerville Food Co-op
Vice President & Secretary, Board of Directors
2024 — present
Board officer through the purchase of the building the co-op operates from. A member campaign raised $155K+ toward the down payment; bank and community financing covered the balance. I write the minutes.
- $1.39M building purchased
- $155K+ member raise
Stack
- TypeScript
- Python
- Swift
- SQL
- Rust → WebAssembly
- Kotlin
- Linux
- PostgreSQL (bitemporal · RLS)
- Supabase
- Modbus / TCP
- WebSockets
- FastAPI · Node.js
- Vitest · Playwright
- Git · GitHub Actions
- Sentry
- AWS · Cloudflare
- Agile / trunk-based
- Claude Code harnesses
If you want to know how the site itself was built, and what is honest about it —
Read the colophon