Javier Ponz An application to 37signals · not affiliated with them

I spent ten years on the other end of the support email.

Apple Retail, 2014 to 2024: diagnosis, Genius Bar, remote support, then leading in-store experience across two shops. Now I build and ship small software of my own.

You people write that support is real work and that small teams beat big ones. I did that job for a decade. Here is the short version, in your format.

The case
  1. 00.Support isn't a tour of duty At Apple it was the job, not a rung. Thousands of people arrived angry, confused, or holding a dead machine with their only copy of something on it. You learn to find the real fault fast and say it in words that don't humiliate anyone.
  2. 01.Leading is serving I ended up leading two shops' floor experience. The job was never to be the smartest person there — it was to clear what was in the team's way, hand over the reasoning instead of the answer, and point credit at whoever earned it. Same instinct I bring to a codebase or a README.
  3. 02.I ship things that are done A life-expectancy web app of mine runs in production on a VPS I administer — Docker, Traefik, TLS, a release gate that refuses to publish on red. Small, finished, and boring in the way working software should be.
  4. 03.I write it down Every repository I own states its scope, its status, and what it is not. I would rather publish a short honest README than a long one that oversells.
  5. 04.Calm is a skill, not a temperament Ten years of live retail floor and escalations. Nothing about a deploy has ever frightened me the way a Saturday queue does.
  6. 05.I'm early, and I know it I'm a career changer, second year, studying AI and full stack at URJC. I'm not going to tell you I'm a senior engineer. I'll tell you what I've built and you can judge the level yourself.
  7. 06.Malleable machines are the interesting bet I run open agent systems daily and I think the good future is a computer its owner can actually alter — Omarchy's plain files and Hermes-style open primitives pointing at the same thing. That's a DHH-shaped opinion and I hold it independently.
What I'd want to do

Support engineering, or the unglamorous seam between customers and the product where somebody has to be technical, patient and a decent writer at the same time. The work that leaves the person on the other end better off than they started — which is the only kind I have ever wanted to do.

If that role doesn't exist, the honest ask is smaller: tell me what the gap is between where I am and someone you'd hire. I'll go close it and come back.

The receipts
Portfolio & CV A thing in production GitHub Email me

This is a personal application, published on my own domain. I am not affiliated with, employed by, or speaking for 37signals, and this is not a 37signals page — no logo, no endorsement, just a candidate who read the manifesto and took the format as a compliment. Their jobs page is at 37signals.com/jobs.