Nikki Asteinza
Software engineer in transition to technical leadership. XR, defence, enterprise. Ten years building things and, more recently, teams and platforms that build things.
I work in simulation, immersive training and tooling for engineering teams. My background is not only technical: I hold a Bachelor's in Psychology and advanced training in coaching and NLP. That combination shapes how I lead teams, because architecture decisions are never only code decisions, and a team that does not communicate does not ship, no matter how good its stack.
Professional and academic trajectory
What I do now
- Lead Developer on the F126 Frigate Programme (Damen Naval — German Navy), building the VR production system for the programme. I designed and led a refactor and pipeline automation that, together with the team's effort, tripled VR course output: from 0.6 to 1.8 per month.
- I design and maintain Notipad, my own platform: Markdown editor, public web, identity and licensing APIs, and a roadmap to turn it into a publishing SaaS.
- I maintain and support Ultimate Porra in production, a social prediction game for football competitions.
- I'm building Reveal It, an app to sell digital surprises revealed by swiping across a card.
- I mentor dev teams. I review PRs. I defend architectural standards when needed — and I fight for team health when that's needed more.
The blog writes itself (almost)
There's a blog, and I don't write it post by post. Every day, an AI automation reviews what I've made —what I decided, what I broke, what I learned— and drafts the summary. I review and publish: a technical journal that maintains itself, almost.
NoteDouble dogfooding: the content is generated by an AI automation and published by Notipad. The site you're reading and the blog that goes with it come from the same system.
A published Mermaid timeline is not fixed by adding overflow. It needs a reading contract: visible scroll, measured gutter, controlled scale and labels that remain inside the first viewport.
What I'm looking for
The next step is a clear Tech Lead / Developer Lead role: technically leading a small team, owning architecture, mentoring engineers and still writing code when the problem justifies it. If you want to know more, jump to the technical profile or reach out.
What I believe
- In building platforms, not isolated products. One engine, several sellable products on top.
- In reading the code before rewriting it. Most "refactorings" should have been extractions.
- In automating what repeats, and leaving alone what only happens once.
- In a good conversation with a dev saving three weeks of misaligned work. And a bad one costing you the dev.
Where to go next
- About me — longer story, context and what I'm looking for.
- CV — detailed technical experience.
- Blog — technical notes on architecture, platforms and product decisions.
- Contact — email and links.
Built with Notipad
This very site was generated by Notipad: its rendering engine and Publish pipeline turned a folder of Markdown into the pages you're reading. Two of the products I build on that platform:
Notipad
A Markdown editor and publishing platform: rich rendering —diagrams, formulas and highlighted code— and a Publish pipeline that takes your notes from folder to a public website with its own domain. This page is Notipad publishing itself.
Ultimate Porra
A social prediction game for football competitions: private games, live voting, official scoring and a real-time leaderboard. It runs on the same platform —identity, licensing, transactional email and edge— that powers the rest of the ecosystem.