I’m John

I work from Mossel Bay on the south coast of South Africa, under the YourDesign name. Most of my week goes into Eden Fintech — a screening and AI-review pipeline for US-listed equities — and a long-running WordPress engagement for a training provider here at home.

The arc

I started in the early 2000s writing trading “bots” for a trading company. By 2004 I was building CRUD PHP / MySQL web applications before the open-source CMS world had meaningful share — which became yourdesign.co.za, 20+ years of freelance WordPress work, custom themes over page builders, and agency sub-contracts on brand projects. The current work — Eden Fintech and the scanner behind it, is a loop back to where the career started, with 22 years of programming discipline now wrapped around it.

Current availability

Tip

I’m actively looking for interesting Quant and Development opportunities. The shapes of work that fit best:

Building or rescuing a quant research platform — ingestion, backtesting discipline, honest evaluation.

Retrofitting LLM and agent pipelines with typed contracts, logging, and proper review stages.

Long-running WordPress engagements where the schema needs to move beyond $wpdb.

Obsidian / Quartz knowledge-graph projects for research, OSINT, or case-study work.

Remote, UTC+2. Open to contract, retainer, or lead-developer roles. The cover letter has more, or reach me at support@edenfintech.com.

What I do

Quant Engineering — research platforms for screening, scoring, and backtesting; honest evaluation as a first-class output.
Agentic Systems — LLM calls behind typed adapters, contract-governed review stages, logged and reproducible.
WordPress & PHP Craft — custom plugins and themes, WooCommerce, and the cases where the schema needs to move beyond $wpdb.
Knowledge Graphs & Wiki Systems — Obsidian + Quartz research wikis, entity taxonomies, graph navigation that does real work.
Python Services & Data Pipelines — the connective tissue: ingestion, snapshot hashing, CLI ergonomics, structured logging.
Design & Brand — 20+ years of custom front-end work; the visual layer on my own sites and on client brand builds.

Currently building

edenfintech-scanner-python — a stdlib-only core plus a three-role LLM review stage behind a typed information barrier.
edenfintech.com — the free weekly watchlist surfaced from the scanner’s output.
SignalTrace (signaltrace.wiki) — a multi-wiki research site over five OSINT / financial-research case studies. Active.
WeCoza 3.0 — long-running WordPress + Postgres client engagement for a South African adult-education training provider.

See the Now page for the current week in more detail.

Wiki sections

This site is also a working record of how I practice. New pages land in these folders over time:

Decisions — positions I hold, with the reasoning attached.
Playbooks — repeatable recipes I want to run the same way twice.
Notes — dated learning log, short-form thinking.
Influences — videos, podcasts, talks, and writing that have shaped the work.
Open questions — things I’m chewing on but haven’t resolved.

DevAi

John Montgomery — DevAi