"Up and coming." "Promising." "One to watch." Every job board and every LinkedIn feed is full of people describing themselves with adjectives. I do not want to do that, because adjectives are unverifiable noise. So this post is something else: my first year of building in public, in receipts, with links. Judge the trajectory, not the adjectives.
The receipts
2022 — the degree, done at night. I started a BSc in Computing and IT with the Open University while working full time. I finished it in 2026. Not a receipt for talent — a receipt for stubbornness, which is more reliable anyway.
2025 — n8n templates that run in production. I built a set of workflow templates for n8n and put them to work. The alert monitor has run 1,892 times at 99.7% success. Lead qualification: 247 runs, 99.2%. Data sync: 312 runs, 97.8%. They are open source: n8n-automation-templates. A template that runs weekly for months without you touching it is worth more than any certificate.
2026 — the job search engine. I automated my own job hunt: 30+ ATS boards, deduplication against every posting I have ever seen, hard rule filters before any LLM call, then LLM scoring against my honest profile. Over 1,500 postings evaluated this year; 1,539 parked; 12 apply-worthy. Public and scrubbed: remote-job-engine and job-sweep. The full story is on dev.to, and auf Deutsch too.
September 2026 — the quality wave. One month, four repos, all with tests: a composable ETL framework (errors as data, whitelist mapping, CI), a SQL playground (55 templates, 115 tests, now a live demo), a file automation toolkit (20 tests), and a finance analytics dashboard. The lesson post is here.
October 2026 — the paper trail. Three technical articles, a bilingual portfolio site, and a live demo instead of dead links. You are reading the third article.
What the receipts have in common
Build things you actually use. My n8n templates monitor services I care about. My job engine found the shortlist I am actually working through. Tools you use daily cannot fake it.
Tests or it did not happen. Every framework repo has a test suite. The SQL playground has 115 tests that execute all 55 templates. This is not rigour for its own sake — it is the difference between "code exists" and "code works."
Write it down. The articles are not marketing. They are the honest lessons, including the ones that cost me: six perfect-looking job candidates that died when I read the actual posting bodies.
The honest gap
I have no professional software engineering title yet. Thirteen years in operations — Lloyds Banking Group, Deutsche Post, sysadmin, currently Amazon print production — and a degree, and all the receipts above, and no job title in software. That is the next receipt, and it is the one I cannot publish myself. Someone has to give it to me.
If your team needs a junior or associate who already works like this — AI, automation, or data, fully remote from Germany or UK — everything is on reaver1000.github.io. The receipts are the résumé. The next one is yours to write.
