Platform engineering and cloud architecture for startups and scale-ups.
Thoughtgears is Jens Skott — 25+ years across development, devops, sysops and platform engineering. When you hire Thoughtgears, I am who does the work. There is no account layer between you and the person writing the code.
Most of what I build runs on Google Cloud, and GCP customers are who I prefer to work with. It isn't a limit — AWS, Cloudflare and hybrid estates are all in scope — but if you're a GCP shop, the depth here is unusual.
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Internal developer platforms that speed a team up without trading away security or compliance.
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Designs that stay affordable as they scale, on GCP and beyond.
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For companies growing faster than their architecture.
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Production CI/CD, observability, and infrastructure as code.
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The tools I use daily, given away. Apache 2.0 or MIT.
| Repository | What it is | |
|---|---|---|
| docker-firebase-emulator | ⭐ 54 · 15 forks · v1.1.0 |
Modular Firebase emulator image. Multi-arch (amd64 + arm64), firebase-tools 15, Java 21 |
| firebase-emulator-demo | JavaScript | A full multi-container app built on that image — the worked example, and its integration test |
| the-slashinator | TypeScript | Cloud Function that disables billing when a GCP budget alert fires. 100% test coverage |
| firestore-backup | Go | Backup and restore Firestore collections, tested against the emulator above in CI |
| cloud-run-dbt | Terraform | dbt on Cloud Run, scheduled, with the infrastructure to run it |
| taxmate | TypeScript | UK contractor tax calculator, inside and outside IR35. 184 tests |
- Business logic ships with tests, or it isn't done. Engines, pricing rules and data transforms get the test first, and they live in pure functions — not buried inside a view where nothing can reach them.
- One owner per resource. Terraform owns durable infrastructure; deploy tooling owns runtime. Two systems writing the same record fight each other, and one of them loses quietly.
- The least backend the problem needs. A server is justified by shared or server-authoritative state, not by habit.
- Least privilege, no long-lived keys. Workload Identity Federation over service-account JSON, everywhere.
Whether you're a founder building your first platform, a CTO whose architecture stopped keeping up, or a team whose cloud bill has become a monthly surprise.
