About me
I'm Chanlito Hem, a technical lead and full-stack engineer in Phnom Penh. I'm half Cuban, so we speak Spanish at home, Khmer is my other native language, and I work in English.
I studied software engineering in Cienfuegos, Cuba. Since then I've built web apps at a Phnom Penh consultancy, spent my longest stretch as the first engineer at Blue, and now lead the build of a loan origination system for a financial institution.
Developing mini Chanlito…
Experience
Technical Lead
Sean Oliver ConsultingMay 2026 – now · Phnom Penh (hybrid)
Leading the build of a loan origination system for a financial institution in Cambodia, from field capture through approval to disbursement.
- An offline-first React Native and Expo tablet app for field agents, with encrypted drafts, background sync and a Khmer and English UI
- A React and TanStack portal for approvers, and a NestJS backend on Oracle with Microsoft Entra ID sign-in
- Growing the team: the engineer role, coding standards and the dev setup new hires start with
See the work:Loan Origination System
Software Engineer Consultant
IndependentJan 2026 – May 2026 · Remote
Designed, built and shipped products for clients as the sole engineer.
- A sports club and fitness platform with AI workout generation, in Elixir and Phoenix LiveView
- A medicine assistant for Cambodia that reads prescriptions and finds one pharmacy that can fill the whole list
See the work:Caracol Sports Club Medicine assistant
Apr 2018 – Dec 2025 · Remote
Joined a project and process management SaaS as its first engineer, and helped grow it to thousands of active users.
- Set the stack (Vue and Nuxt, Node.js, GraphQL, MySQL) and led the first production release
- Built the custom fields engine and the drag-and-drop form builder, one of the most used features
- Real-time collaboration with GraphQL subscriptions and Redis, and a job pipeline running 10,000+ jobs a day
- Found and fixed production slowdowns with indexes, rewritten queries and caching
- Grew the engineering team from 1 to 6, with code review, coding standards and onboarding docs
See the work:Blue
Software Engineer, then Tech Lead
PathmazingOct 2015 – Feb 2018 · Phnom Penh
Built web apps and REST APIs for enterprise clients at a Phnom Penh consultancy, then led the backend as tech lead.
- Owned backend architecture and delivery across client projects
- Brought in code review and coding standards
See the work:Tesjor
How I work
- Done is a claim
Green tests describe the code. Before I call something done, I want to see it work on the real device, the way the person using it would.
From the article: Green Tests, Broken App: Why Our Agents Have to Show Their Work
- Ask what could go wrong
Not who read the code. The risk of a change decides how much review it gets, and a red build doesn't merge.
From the article: How I'd do pull request review today
- Start small, grow in stages
Good ideas usually stall at the cost of building them. Find evidence first, build a small version, and grow it one stage at a time.
From the article: Why good software ideas in Cambodia stay ideas
Latest article: The scripts I should have written first
Skills
- TypeScript
- React
- React Native
- Expo
- TanStack
- Tailwind CSS
- Node.js
- NestJS
- GraphQL
- Vue
- Nuxt
- Claude Code
+22 morefewer
- JavaScript
- SQL
- Elixir
- Next.js
- Offline-first Android
- Phoenix LiveView
- REST
- OpenAPI
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- Oracle
- Redis
- TypeORM
- Prisma
- Docker
- AWS
- Linux
- GitHub Actions
- GitLab CI
- OpenAI
- Gemini
- Codex
Passport
Education
Cienfuegos
Cuba · 2010 – 2015
Bachelor of Software Engineering
Universidad de CienfuegosBased in
Phnom Penh
Cambodia
Languages
- Khmer (native)
- Spanish (native)
- English (full professional)
Off the clock
- MMORPG
World of Warcraft
Last seen in Azeroth
- Action RPG
Path of Exile 2
Last seen in Wraeclast
Let's build something
Got a product to build, a team that needs a technical lead, or just a question? Send me a note.