Hire for judgment, not theater.
I look for people who read source, cut dependencies, and solve the simple way first. Resume buzzwords are noise.
ZEROBEARING
Dave
Bradford
I help businesses ship software. Agents write the code. I design the systems. Thirty years of shipping, now at agent speed.
How I work.
I grow engineering teams that ship. I stay close enough to the code to keep the architecture honest.
How I lead
Make the work clear.
Before a team burns a cycle, we lock what we are building, who it is for, and what we will not do. Ambiguity is expensive; naming it early is cheap.
Coach in the codebase.
Mentoring is not a separate program. It is reviews, refactors to show the simpler path, and promoting people who learn the framework before inventing their own.
Protect focus.
I keep the team on fewer bets and push back on complexity before it earns its keep.
How I stay technical
Design the system, not just the tickets.
I still draw how the pieces fit, what can break, and what ships first. That is the same craft I used as first engineer and as VP.
Jump in when it unblocks.
Pairing, a thin prototype, or a sharp architecture review when the team is stuck. Hands-on, not heroic.
AI as a force multiplier with checkpoints.
Agents draft and verify. Humans keep judgment on the critical path: standards, security, and whether the shape still matches the product.
Ship early.
Live beats perfect. The loop is the same whether the team is five people or thirty-five.
Experience.
Teams that hired me. What I did.
Gierd
Founding engineer on the product team. Grew engineering, shipped the customer Rails app from greenfield, and owned the data platform end to end.
Daasity
First engineer in the door. Built the data platform. Grew the team from zero to 25 people.
TaylorMade
Built the course-mapping software behind MyRoundPro, their golf GPS and shot-tracking product.
Pear Sports
Founding backend engineer. Built the device API and coaching platform, then stayed through the move to a hardware-agnostic Rails stack.
RaceHQ
Founding engineer on the white-label race-event SaaS at TACTIC Race Solutions. Concept to shipped product.
TED-Ed
Features for teachers and students on ed.ted.com.
More on LinkedIn
Places I have worked.
Companies that put me on live products.
Gierd2024-2026
Daasity2017-2024
TaylorMade2015-2017
Pear Sports2010-2015
TACTIC Race Solutions2011-2014
Odoclub2007-2014
TED-Ed2012-2013
twitterfeed2009-2010
chi.mp2008-2009
Brandgineers2007-2008
mSnap2007
Sharp Healthcare2005-2006
Affinity Development Group2002-2005
Advanced Reservation Systems2002
BDC Technologies1999-2002
Cyberworks1997-1999
PennySaver USA1996
Recently shipped.
Live projects I build and ship solo, with agents. Where I tinker, stay curious, and keep learning.
We Build It
A group chat front door for builders. Join, share ideas, and collaborate on what you're shipping.
webuildit.devOmatalk
Local text-to-speech for Omarchy. Select text, press a key, hear it read back. Fully local, no network calls at runtime.
omatalk.zerobearing.comRails AI
My toolkit for making agents build Rails to my standard: architecture, tests, and security. The same rigor behind everything I ship.
rails-ai.devThe Feedback Agent
People leave feedback without a name. AI clarifies it without flattening their voice. Live.
thefeedbackagent.comI'm Dave.
I'm Dave Bradford. I have been building software since 1996 and shipping on Rails since 2006. The code was never the job. The systems and the architecture are, and that has been true from the start. Give me a rough idea and I build the whole thing, the product and the platform under it.
Most of my career has been startups: wearing every hat and learning the business as closely as the code. I build things that hold up in production. Data platforms I started from nothing still run today, ingesting billions of rows a day and driving the decisions those businesses need. I grew the teams around them too, from a handful of engineers to dozens.
Right now I'm shipping my own products with my own team of agents. It is where I build and prove the strategies I would bring to your project: the systems and processes that get agents building real software.
What I believe.
- Keep it simple. Scale only when you need to.
- Privacy and security come first, not as an afterthought.
- I back opensource. I back self-hosting.
- The cloud isn't always the answer.
- Remove dependencies whenever possible.
1996Building software sinceBillions/dayRows ingested, still in productionStartupsVeteran of many
What people say.
People who have worked with me, in their words.
He introduced AI-augmented development and agentic automations that acted as a force multiplier for our engineering output.
An extremely talented and multi-faceted programmer, who stood fast on the basis of building products correctly.
He taught me so much about Ruby on Rails, software engineering best practices, and software architecture.