About

I'm Avram Stern, a senior full stack engineer in San José, Costa Rica 🇨🇷, with more than 10 years of building for the web. I work across the stack, from HTML email that renders in Outlook to authentication flows that span several applications, and these days I build with AI agents and verify what they ship. The full history is on my résumé.

Work

From 2013 to 2021 I was at Prodigious, part of Publicis, growing from media operations to senior creative engineer. I built emails and landing pages for American Express, Delta, Kellogg's, Dunkin' and PlayStation, where fallbacks and testing on real clients were the job, not an afterthought. One example: an interactive PlayStation email that still works in Outlook. I also made my first personal site in 2013.

Since 2021 I've been at Gorilla Logic, embedded on client product teams. At HIMSS I built activity feeds and real-time chat for a healthcare networking platform. At The Pro's Closet I helped build an e-commerce storefront from scratch on Next.js. At Cyngn I built terrain layers for a mapping editor used to route autonomous industrial robots. At Panasonic Well I owned the Stripe auth and payment flows, led the change that made 3D Secure mandatory for Japan, and ran production releases for the web apps. A recent example of how I work is an authentication change across several applications and how I explained it to the team.

How I work now

I build software with AI agents and still know exactly what got built. The brief and the conventions come before any code. Agents run in parallel on separate pieces. The compiler, the linter and the tests decide when something is done, and I review everything that comes back. At work this looks like Claude Code skills that read a Jira ticket, map the change across two repositories and propose an estimate with its reasoning, and agents that trace a bug from the front end to the production database. AI drafts and investigates. I validate every finding against the code and handle anything client-facing myself.

Rust is where this clicked: a strict compiler is a reviewer that never gets tired, and I wrote about building a disk usage tool with it. The same thinking applies to AI in production. pii-gate is a TypeScript library that masks personal data in prompts before they reach an LLM API and restores it in the reply. TypeScript and JavaScript are still home.

About this site

Built with Next.js and Tailwind CSS. Posts are Markdown rendered at build time, and the Spotify API feeds the list below. It runs on an Ubuntu server I set up myself, with Nginx in front of Node.js.

I write the posts, and I build and edit with AI tools. Anything on this site written by a model carries an “AI-generated” badge, so you always know who is talking.

On repeat

Just for fun, I linked the Spotify API to this site. These are my current top 10 tracks, mostly from my ‘mambamentality’ workout playlist 💪🏻. Maybe you'll like a song or two.