MetaCTO

Mobile app design and development that helps business owners create new revenue streams, increase customer lifetime value, and improve profit margins.

Partner

olive

Head of Engineering

Round

Round is a curated community of technology executives and senior leaders who support, grow, mentor, and learn from each other. The Round experience supports leaders who are at the forefront of technology, working on products and services that have an outsized impact on the world.

Founding Member

Power Digital Marketing

Team and product leadership for the Nova platform at Power Digital Marketing. The machine learning platform that can analyze any business’s growth opportunities, build a marketing strategy to execute on them, and track progress across 13+ channels in custom-tailored dashboards.

VP Engineering & Product

KlientBoost

Founded, launched and sold a marketing tech SaaS product.

- Grew team of 6 engineers plus product design and support staff
- Managed feature roadmap, technical architecture, development, delivery, and support
- Produced 50% trial-to-paid customer conversions
- Created education path for junior engineers
- Managed agile process of reviews, retros, standup, backlog

The flagship product for Kite Software integrated with Google Ads API to analyze accounts with custom algorithms and generate ROI focused recommendations. Scaled to process millions of records at a time with AWS serverless and queue services. Built with TypeScript, Node.js, Express, Python, Serverless, React, Redux, CircleCI, Docker, Gatsby, GraphQL.

VP Engineering, Kite Software

Maverick

Lead server side API development and web application team to support iOS startup venture creating a new social community for empowering young women. genmaverick.com

Develop microservices with NodeJS and MongoDB.  React and redux front end development.  Machine learning for moderation and transcriptions.  Rapid feature development including comments service, trending algorithms, and gamification progression engine.  Support PHP Zend MySQL API framework.  Mentor and train team members.  Manage technical contractors and support the agile development process.

Software Engineering Manager

JNR Incorporated

- Designed and developed a Node.js and MongoDB microservice-based API with a custom Express Gateway on an AWS Lambda-hosted serverless environment (api.paymentrise.com).
- Built a React and Redux front-end web application for customers to redeem prepaid reward cards with unique offer codes for BoostMobile clients.
- Led the technical team for new product development, defined software engineering processes, and implemented Agile Scrum methodologies.
- Created a custom Python script for serverless S3 deployment integrated with GitLab CI/CD.
- Introduced Git, Continuous Integration (CI), and Agile project methodologies to the team.
- Led the migration of a data center to an AWS cloud-hosted environment.
- Developed and supported large-scale Prepaid Card Industry applications for incentive programs, card activation, and card ordering.
- Built a REST API to securely interface new applications with legacy cardholder data systems, ensuring PCI DSS compliance at all levels.

Senior Software Architect, Lead

Blink Development, Inc.

Founded Blink Development with one partner and grew to a peak staff over 10 employees servicing website development and marketing.  Launched and serviced over 40 projects in 5 years, generating over $1.5M annual gross revenue.  Served as lead developer on all major projects.

Founder & Lead Developer

Fletcher Jones Motorcars

Started as a PC installation technician in 1999.  Advanced through many positions over 11 years with responsibilities including database administration, web development, help desk, project management, vendor management, and ultimately data warehousing and BI analysis with C#, .NET MVC, SharePoint, MSSQL Server, and SSRS.

Business Information Analyst, Developer, System Admin

At MetaCTO, we build custom mobile apps that help businesses grow new revenue streams, create online communities, increasing customer LTV with digital products, and make client communication more personal.

Christopher Fitkin

Young software devs are in BIG trouble.

Yes, it’s AI-related. No, it’s not what you think…

AI is not just taking your job…. AI is taking your skill.

Back in the day, if I got stuck, I’d call a friend or watch some YouTube videos - building, breaking, fixing, understanding why. I wrestled with the code until it finally clicked. But those days are gone.

Less YouTube… more vibe coding with AI. Letting Cursor or ChatGPT handle the hard parts. Then… when things aren’t working, “It’s this stupid prompt!”

The problem isn’t AI writing mediocre code.
It’s that too many new devs are letting it ‘think’ for them.

That’s dangerous!

Not just for devs, but for the companies that will hire them. If this trend continues, it’ll become harder and harder to find experienced devs - not to mention… expensive!

If AI writes all your early code, you never learn why things work. And when something breaks (and it always does), you’re lost.

So if you’re learning to code… sure, use AI.

But don’t forget what actually makes you valuable… asking questions, getting explanations, exploring ideas, breaking things, fixing them.

Write code yourself.

AI won’t make coding obsolete.

Because coding isn’t the hard part. Thinking is.

Coding is just putting decisions into a machine. The real work happens before a single line of code is written:

→ Understanding the problem
→ Resolving ambiguity
→ Designing systems
→ Building something that actually works in the real world for real people

The engineering part.
Coding is the boring/easy part.
(or it should be, or you’ve already made a big mistake)

AI can clear away the boilerplate and speed up execution, sure. But it can’t tell you what to build, why it matters, or how it should behave under pressure.

That’s the hard part. That’s the human part. No tool for that yet, unfortunately.

That’s why great engineers will always matter… no matter how good the tools get.

My reflections as a seasoned dev.

How things have changed. And how nothing has changed.

When I started coding 20 years ago, I thought experience was about knowing the latest tech stack and knowing how to speak to stakeholders. But I’m wiser now.

Now I know it’s about pattern recognition.

You see enough product launches, tech fads, and “revolutions,” and you realize - most of it’s just a remix of the same few lessons.

Back then it was cloud computing. Then mobile. Then blockchain. Now it’s AI.

Every cycle starts the same way… big promises, endless hype, and a bunch of companies racing to “adopt” it before they even know why.

But the people who kept their heads down, focused on fundamentals, and used the new tools responsibly end up miles ahead.

That’s what I’ve learned as a dev, a CTO, and now as a founder.

The technology always changes.
The patterns never do.

You build. You test. You fail. You learn. Then you do it again.

AI is just the newest tool in the box. Powerful? Absolutely. Transformative? Potentially. But like every tool before it… it’s only as useful as the people using it.

And that’s what I love most about this work.

The technology evolves every year, but the craft of building new things is timeless. How cool is that?

A software dev agency can be EXPENSIVE.

Relying on vibe-coding can be CATASTROPHIC.

I’m seeing more and more founders come to me with apps that were “built with AI.”

They say: 
“Faster, cheaper, modern”

Reality says: 
“Chris, you’re about to spend 2+ weeks cleaning up this mess I made in 2 hours.”

Because 9 times out of 10, the code is slow, not secure, and stitched together with ZERO understanding of architecture. Functions deleted. Logic duplicated. API calls written by AI that don’t actually work in production.

They thought they saved money by going cheap.

But by the time I’m brought in, they’ve already spent 3x fixing what should have been done right the first time.

This is the hidden cost of “vibe-coding”… when developers (or agencies) lean on AI to “move fast,” but skip all the fundamentals: planning, testing, structure, and review.

AI can: scaffold + boilerplate.
AI can NOT: design a system, handle edge cases, think through the user experience.

If you’re hiring a dev team right now, make sure they:

a) Can explain why they’re using AI, not just that they are
b) Have a review process that catches AI mistakes early
c) Know how to architect clean, maintainable code

It’s cheaper - and far less painful - to get it built right the first time than to pay someone like me to untangle it later.

Hire builders > vibe-coders

A concerned friend asked me if he should worry about the AWS outage. My answer: "Nope! If AWS goes down, so does half the internet. Your customers will understand.”

Even the biggest players out there aren’t fully “multi-cloud.”

HubSpot and Jira could spend millions to make their systems redundant across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure… but they don’t.

Why? Because it’s:

a) extremely expensive
b) extremely complicated
c) extremely unnecessary

99.9% of the time, AWS works flawlessly.
And when it doesn’t… they recover fast.
Simple as that.

“Multi-cloud” just doubles your complexity. You’re now maintaining 2 versions of your app on 2 platforms that don’t talk to each other. That means 2x the bugs, 2x the monitoring, and 2x the headaches…

All to protect against something that happens maybe once every few years.

If you’re a startup or SMB, my advice is to prioritize recovery, not invincibility.

You’ll make far more progress by building systems that bounce back quickly when things break instead of trying to prevent every possible failure forever.

So no, you don’t need to panic about AWS. 😉

Indeed is stopping senior devs mentoring junior devs.

Seems pretty shortsighted to me.

When I was starting out, I learned almost everything that mattered from senior devs who took the time to explain the “why” not just the “how”. These conversations made me think differently about architecture, tradeoffs, and people.

Mentorship shaped my entire career and I know a lot of devs who’d say the same.

So when I see companies like Indeed stepping away from mentorship in favor of AI “efficiency”… 
I understand (they think it sounds smart & boards love it). But it’s premature. And honestly, a bit shortsighted.

And it’s not just mentorship. Indeed hasn’t hired juniors or interns in years.

These points kept coming to my mind:

a) How will they keep up with inevitable amount of mistakes AI will cause
b) They’re losing future leaders (but shareholders need “NOW”)
c) Culture erodes fast (everyone under ‘senior’ panics & looks for other opportunities just in case)

Curious to hear everyone else’s thoughts though.

Businesses… this is a warning:

Don’t “use AI” for the sake of “using AI”.

Lately, I’m seeing articles of companies tracking how much their engineers use AI.

How silly!

I’m not a fan of all this “adopt AI or get fired” talk in the tech industry. If you’re forcing your team to “use AI more” just to check a box… you’ve missed the point of AI.

Good engineers use the right tool for the job - not whatever’s trending on LinkedIn. When you make AI usage a performance metric, you stop incentivizing results and start incentivizing “busy work”.

Think about it from a dev’s perspective -

If you’re going to pay them to use AI… you’ll get diagrams no one asked for, scripts no one runs, and dashboards that look cool but do nothing.

And for what?

Engineers are your most valuable asset. Not some AI tool you started to use in 2024 because every post on LinkedIn tells you to “leverage AI”.

Engineers are the reason any of this tech works in the first place!

So yes, AI can make good engineers faster.
But no, it can’t make bad incentives smarter.

I’ve been building things my whole life.

Age 5: messing around in MS-DOS and BASIC.

Age 16:
- got paid for my first “professional” project - a car auction site - in the form of a black 1990 Jeep Cherokee (still one of my favorite paychecks).

Age 18:
- went to college thinking I’d be a lawyer. Majored in Political Science & Italian. But the whole time, I was secretly doing my roommates’ CS homework because I just enjoyed coding.

After school, I skipped law school & took a job as a business data analyst.

Age 22:
- quit and started my first web dev agency. That lasted five years… then collapsed.

Age 27:
- spent the next decade in-house - startups, MarTech, AdTech, big engineering orgs. Built massive teams. Learned P&L, delivery, sales motions, investor pressure, and how thousand-person agencies really operate.

I think it was at this time that I realized something important: I’m a builder. First software. Then teams. Now companies.

2024:
- my now-business partner, Garrett, called me and said: “Hey, I’m starting an agency. Want to join me?”

I quit the next day.

Year 1 of MetaCTO:
- scrappy. Just a small team building great products, relying on our network, getting stuck in.

Year 2 of MetaCTO: 
- we went all-in on growth: SEO, PPC, partnerships. Grew ~300% YoY vs Year 1.

We started working with incredible people/companies:

• Jamie – Head of Engineering 
• Kristen – Head of Revenue 
• Closed official partnerships with RevenueCat, and building motions with AppsFlyer + CleverTap

We also hit major milestones: From near-zero organic traffic → 1,600 monthly visitors + 84 inbound leads last month.

We’re building MetaCTO into a $50M+ product & engineering partner.

So… why do I do this?

1. I love building things
- mobile app MVPs, AI features, even entire engineering org - creating gives me life.

2. I love helping others succeed
- I spent years building software for startups. I know exactly what founders go through: pressure, confusion, tradeoffs.

3. I want to build the company I wish I’d had as a partner
- a place where builders get to build, clients get clarity instead of bureaucracy, value gets created & not extracted

If you read this far - thanks.

This is the stuff I never shared, but probably should have years ago.

If you’re building a product and need help with strategy, AI features, or mobile execution… my DMs are open.

Bureaucracy kills creativity.

Daily standups, PR reviews, design reviews, stakeholder reviews of the design reviews…

You could spend a whole week talking about building… instead of actually building. That’s one of the biggest reasons I started my own company. Just solving real problems for real people.

(Is that cliché? Man, that sounds cliché. But, I guess its true so 🤷‍♂️)

To keep our focus on what matters, our process looks more like this:

1️⃣ Find the real problem (not the one written in the Jira ticket)
2️⃣ Build an MVP fast
3️⃣ Get feedback (usually some more features)
4️⃣ Iterate
5️⃣6️⃣7️⃣ Client happy. Ship it. Send the invoice

No red tape.

(Unless the client sells gift wrapping… then maybe, yeah. Some red tape.)

“Vibe coding” is Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year

✅ The good: more people than ever are being exposed to coding. That’s exciting.

❌ The bad: we don’t yet know the long-term effects - i.e. poorly written, AI-generated code could mean major security breaches and costly maintenance down the line.

Double-edged sword.

Curious - where do you fall on this? Excited or skeptical?

I won’t @ the company.

But some chatbots do more harm than good!

I can’t share my actual screenshots (they mention their name), but so you can get an understanding of my experience with a pretty well-known company’s chatbot last week…

Check out my image for this post.
Yeah, that was basically it.

And this company is massive! Makes me question all the companies completely outsourcing their customer service.

Charles River Laboratories

Senior Technical Director Architecture and Engineering

Technical Director Customer Experience Engineering

Director, Digital Architecture

Full Stack Software Engineer

Engineered a new multi-tenant, white-labelled, prepaid incentive serverless SaaS software platform. SaaS platform is built on AWS utilizing React, NodeJS, TypeScript, Webpack, CloudFormation, Lambda, ECS, API Gateway, QLDB, Aurora Serverless, Dynamo, and DocumentDB. Built an employee recognition prepaid website in VueJS and Laravel where employees can send prepaid debit cards to other employees up to specified limits.

Software Engineer II

Building prepaid software incentive solutions for several large enterprise clients. Personally responsible for over fifty complex legacy web sites for enterprise clients. Maintained and migrated legacy and recently built software sites to adhere to PCI DSS compliance.

Age of Learning, Inc.

Building curriculum and education focused software solutions on AWS with JavaScript web components, Neptune, Dynamo, ElasticSearch, Lambda, Kinesis Data and Kinesis Client Library, PHP, S3, and CloudFormation.

Software Engineer III

Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation (TIBI)

Engineered Wellavive, a React Native mobile application, Laravel API, and Azure infrastructure written in Terraform. Wellavive is a full-stack HIPAA compliant direct-to-patient digital health platform for clinical trial and organ transplant recipient patients.
Wellavive offers patients the convenience of tracking their medication, answering questionnaires for clinics, and logging their symptoms instead of traveling to the clinic.

Lead Software Engineer

Contract Software Engineer

Heart Cup, Inc.

Developed the Heart Cup social network platform which aimed to promote community driven charitable giving between people and nonprofits.

Software Engineer

Vantage LED USA

Built digital signage media playback software, internal business tooling, IoT Electronic Shelving Label solutions, and virtual/hardware scoreboard integrations.
Developed suite of digital signage media playback software for LED digital signs, LCD televisions, and Electronic Shelving Labels.

Tribogenics

Automated the QA metal alloy identification process for the Watson X-Ray Fluorescence gun through via Android application integration and serial Bluetooth communication to an Arduino powered robot for the intended purpose of validating metal alloy identification to increase accuracy.

Software Engineer Intern

Bumblebee Wireless™

Responsible for managing employees through payroll, hiring, and the creation of a commission based incentive program.
Implemented cell phone/computer repair point of sale terminals for multiple kiosk locations. 
Trained cell phone repair technicians to repair Apple, Samsung, LG, HTC, and several other popular celluar brands.

Manager

Repaired Apple, Samsung, LG, HTC, and several other popular celluar brands.
Repaired laptop and desktop PCs in a fast paced environment.
Computer virus removal and software repair.

Repair Technician

Erik Dyrr Flooring

Preparation and installation of tile, carpet, and laminate flooring.
Flooring finish work such as grout for tiled floors, fireplaces, and kitchen countertops.

Flooring Specialist

As a Senior Technical Director CXE, I am an experienced leader with a proven track record of successfully managing teams of software engineers to develop scalable and maintainable software solutions. With expertise in full-stack web development, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps, I have overseen projects from ideation to deployment and ensured their alignment with business objectives. My skills in team leadership, software engineering practices, and product development have enabled me to deliver high-quality products to clients across a range of industries.

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The Battle

Christopher Fitkin

Brandon Saunders

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Christopher Fitkin's LinkedIn Performance

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