Twenty years in hospitality and serviced accommodation taught me what small businesses need from a website. Three production systems taught me how to build it.
I'm a full-stack engineer with twenty years of first-hand experience running the kind of businesses I now build websites for. That combination is rarer than it sounds.
I spent over twenty years running my own businesses before I wrote a line of production code. That included a serviced accommodation operation and hospitality work in North London, managing bookings, suppliers, and maintenance schedules. The small crises that come with running a property-based business: a burst pipe at 11pm, a guest who can't find the key safe, a cleaner who cancels at short notice.
I'm a full-stack engineer. I've shipped three real production systems. A booking and management platform for my own accommodation business. An AI document-ingestion pipeline for a legal workflow. A multi-channel chatbot that runs on real customer enquiries. They handle real users. They're still running.
The AI side is not a bolt-on. I've built RAG pipelines using LangChain and pgvector, connected them to OpenAI's API, and deployed them in workflows that handle actual customer queries. I've seen this technology waste money on use cases it can't handle. I've also seen it cut response times from hours to seconds in the right place.
I'm based in London. I work alone. My clients deal directly with the engineer. There's no account manager in between. Plain English throughout. The invoice matches what we agreed.
These are the tools I use on every project. I've shipped production code with each one.
Next.js
React framework for fast, server-rendered websites
TypeScript
Typed JavaScript that catches mistakes at build time
Tailwind CSS
Utility-first styling for custom designs without writing raw CSS
Shadcn UI
Accessible component library built on Radix primitives
LangChain
Framework for building applications that connect to language models
OpenAI
The API behind AI text, embeddings, and chatbot integrations
Vercel
Deployment platform for Next.js sites, with zero-config CI/CD
pgvector
PostgreSQL extension for vector search: the backbone of RAG pipelines
I'm a classically trained chef, forty-plus years in the kitchen, trained in the Paul Bocuse tradition. I run a personal chef service at bjluc.co.uk. I also run Topstay.uk, a B2B serviced-accommodation business based in North London.
I cook. I run a serviced-accommodation business. I build websites for a living. None of those are on their own enough, but together they cover most of what a small business actually needs.
When you email me, you email me. No account manager. No sales team. No escalation path. The person quoting the work is the person doing the work.
That means fewer meetings, lower overhead, and a site that reflects what you actually asked for. When there's only one person on the project, nothing gets lost in translation.
Send me your business name and current site. I'll come back with a free mockup in 2–3 days.