tamayo.co
Open to senior roles & select projects
San Diego · --:--:-- · and counting
Mexican & American
Senior PHP & Laravel Engineer
Time is the only true currency.
I’m Juan Carlos Tamayo, a developer who directs machines, verifies the work, and takes responsibility for the outcome. You don’t pay me for keystrokes. You pay me for the hours you get back.
Notes on time
I’ve spent 15+ years writing code. Then the bots showed up and started writing it faster than I ever could.
For a minute, that scared me. Then it hit me: the code was never the product. The code was just the receipt.
What people are actually buying, what they’ve always been buying, is time. The business owner who hires a developer isn’t buying PHP. He’s buying back his evenings. The startup that pays for software isn’t buying software. It’s buying speed: weeks of its life, returned.
Anyone can learn to code now. Hell, the bots can code. But someone has to decide what to build, why it matters, and whether it’s right. Someone has to point the machine in a direction worth going. That’s not typing. That’s judgment: experience plus taste, compressed into decisions that save everyone time.
Money comes and goes. Code gets rewritten. Time only moves one way.
Spend it well. Or hire someone who’ll spend it for you.
Juan Carlos Tamayo
About
I’m self-taught. I wrote my first PHP app in 2010, then spent twelve years at DesignStudio Network growing from web developer to software architect. Now I build on my own: Movda, my own tools, and AI agents I direct and check line by line. I still own the whole problem: the data model, the API, the deploy pipeline, and the runbook the next person reads. Hiring for a senior Laravel role, or need something built? Same guy.
Stack
PHP 8 · Laravel · Eloquent · queues & scheduling · REST APIs · MySQL · RBAC
Vue.js 3 · Inertia · JavaScript · HTML · CSS
Custom plugins · WooCommerce · WP-Cron · content at scale
PHPUnit · Pest · Playwright · Docker · GitHub Actions · AWS · DigitalOcean
Selected work
Now
Laravel · Vue 3 · Nightlife app
A nightlife social-discovery app: see who’s out tonight, ping them, broadcast your night. Más vida. Opt-in, venue-level, 21+, built for San Diego & Tijuana. Brand, coming-soon page and MVP live now, in testing.
movda.app ↗Laravel · Vue · Inertia
Agency operations app I built and use in my freelance work: projects, time tracking, client portals, proposals and profitability, tested with PHPUnit and Playwright.
mnrkapp.com ↗WordPress · OAuth
Open-source WordPress email plugin with Google/Microsoft OAuth, backup connections, encrypted credentials and delivery diagnostics. Running live on Google.
GitHub ↗Laravel · Vue 3
Visual form builder with conditional logic and multi-page flows that exports standalone HTML, CSS and JS.
GitHub ↗Laravel · PHP GD
Self-hosted batch image optimizer: compress, resize and convert to JPEG, PNG or WebP with before/after previews and ZIP downloads.
GitHub ↗Earlier work
Laravel · WordPress · API
A content-syndication platform and API I architected and owned for about seven years. A custom plugin turns JSON and Vue templates into pages and WooCommerce products across 300+ WordPress sites, with scheduled publishing, backups, rollback and alerts.
Laravel · Vue.js · Marketplace MVP
A freelancer portfolio and digital-product marketplace. I built the original WordPress proof of concept, then architected the Laravel rebuild with a Vue.js frontend and implemented the backend, doing most of the development: custom profiles, digital-product management and sales workflows, permissions and project workflows.
mvp.designstudio.com ↗400 more client projects, delivered over 12 years with DesignStudio Network agency (2014–2026) and for the American Red Cross
Experience
Founded Movda, a nightlife social-discovery app for San Diego & Tijuana — brand, coming-soon page and MVP, live and in testing. Shipping personal projects: MNRK (agency ops), ByteSqueeze (image optimizer), TS SMTP (WordPress email plugin) and Tamayo Forms (visual form builder). Directing AI agents across development, design and QA. Writing on the economics of time in the age of AI: code is cheap, judgment is scarce.
Architected Syndified and a Laravel/Vue marketplace MVP, led an AWS→DigitalOcean migration (~30% cheaper), set up Docker and GitHub Actions pipelines, mentored developers.
Built scheduled publishing, an ad-spend and hours reporting dashboard, and WooCommerce ERP/CRM integrations.
Client applications, WordPress plugins and long-term maintenance.
Custom PHP/MySQL apps, an auction platform with proxy bidding, and member websites.
AI-assisted workflow
In-editor pairing for multi-file refactors and fast iteration on Laravel and Vue code.
Terminal agent for planning, implementing and testing features end to end.
Parallel tasks and second-opinion reviews on pull requests.
Every diff read, tested with PHPUnit and Playwright, and owned by me.
Define the plan and expected behavior before any code is generated.
Pair with Cursor, Claude Code and Codex for implementation and refactors.
Read every diff, run PHPUnit and Playwright, and debug what the tools miss.
CI on GitHub Actions, then a deploy I can roll back.
Contact
Hiring a senior Laravel or full-stack engineer? Or got a project that’s eating your hours? I’d like to hear about it.