I learned software by building my way into real problems.

I’m Wiel Zouantcha, a full stack design engineer based in Washington, DC.

I did not follow a conventional computer-science path. I studied pre-nursing, stepped away, and eventually completed a full-stack software engineering program at Flatiron School. My first production role was at SaaS Alerts, where I learned that integration work is rarely about connecting two clean APIs. It is about inconsistent data, incomplete documentation, operational constraints, and making careful claims about what the system actually knows.

I later spent three and a half years at Ethos. I joined through blockchain work and grew into a senior full-stack role spanning commerce, product interfaces, internal APIs, multi-tenant systems, and production reliability.

Alongside that work, I kept building products of my own. MTL Archives began with a public dataset and became a cultural archive. Port Observatory MTL started as a live view of the Port of Montreal. That work became PortMind, an ongoing research project: a benchmark for port-operations AI on this dataset. Diane Party Rentals put me inside the operational reality of a physical business rather than outside it writing software requirements.

I don’t always start with a product in mind. Sometimes I’m just curious about a city, a photograph, or how someone runs their business. Building gives me a way to stay with that curiosity. I can follow it from a question into the data, the interface, and eventually a conversation with someone using what I made.