Tom Renard, Senior Product Engineer

Six years in, mostly React and TypeScript, mostly Berlin. I studied management before I wrote code, which is probably why I care more about whether a feature moved anything than about how it was built.

Now

I work at Aroundhome, a marketplace for home improvement. Homeowners describe a project, we match them with vetted local trade companies, and the partner pays for the introduction, not the homeowner. Thousands of requests a week, across solar, heating, kitchens, windows and a dozen more categories.

I am on the team that owns the middle step, the matching itself.

I take features from the first conversation to the number they move. That means shaping the requirement with product and design, building it wherever it needs to be built, then owning the rollout and the read on whether it worked.

Most recently that was moving the contact step onto the brand site the visitor started on, instead of sending them to our main domain. Frontend, backend and infrastructure in one feature.

I would rather give an honest read that says not yet than a win that does not hold up.

What I am good at

Frontend is where I am deepest, and the decisions I care about are the ones with system-wide consequences: what runs in the browser at all, where the client and server line sits, how a design system actually gets adopted rather than just designed, and how you turn a risky change on without paging anyone.

Under React there is a web platform, and that is where scaled frontends break. Cookie domains, consent surviving a redirect, CORS per origin, CDN cache behaviour. I have shipped a form onto nine brand domains and hit all of it.

Accessibility I treat as a deadline rather than a virtue. The European Accessibility Act has applied since June 2025 to the consumer services it covers, which makes it a compliance conversation with a stakeholder rather than a moral one.

The longer version, with where each position came from, is on craft. I go into the Go and Ruby services when the problem lives there, and into the infrastructure when it lives there instead.

How I work with AI

I use coding agents all day. They make the first draft cheap, which moves the hard part to deciding what should ship, so that is where I spend the time: state boundaries, edge cases, and whether the thing actually does what the ticket asked for.

My side projects make that explicit. Deterministic scripts do the arithmetic, the model only does judgement, and in one of them the build refuses to publish if a claim is not sourced. Guardrails first, then let the agent run.

Stack

• Frontend: React, TypeScript, Next.js (App Router, RSC), Astro, Tailwind

• Backend: Go, Ruby, GraphQL, Postgres

• Infra and tooling: Terraform, CloudFront, Docker, GitHub Actions, Datadog

• Testing: Playwright, Vitest, WCAG 2.2
• AI tooling: Claude Code, Cursor