Jonathan Helvey

Hi, I'm Jonathan Helvey, a software engineer who loves building interactive, animated, responsive web apps. I come from a background in the arts and brought that creativity to software. The browser is my canvas.

By day I'm a software engineer on an enterprise team, building and maintaining production web applications, the APIs behind them and search with Elasticsearch.

On my own time I build TrendWake, a trading-ideas platform I designed and run end to end: the React front end, the PHP/Symfony API, PostgreSQL, payments, infrastructure and deploys.

I build with AI every day. AI coding agents like Claude Code are part of my daily workflow for planning, building, reviewing and testing. I treat them like a very fast pair programmer: I set the direction, review every change and own what ships. I also build AI into products. TrendWake has LLM-powered trade reviews and market summaries, plus an MCP server that lets people connect their own AI assistants to their account.

Before that I spent four years as Lead Full Stack Developer at Upper Limits Midwest, building and speeding up its Magento 2 e-commerce platform, including Elasticsearch product search. Earlier I worked at agnoStack, a startup building an omni-channel plugin for Zendesk, integrating Magento, BigCommerce and Stripe APIs and building internal dashboards. I also freelanced in the Chicago area, building sites for actors and small businesses.

I'm a graduate of Fullstack Academy, an intensive coding bootcamp covering Node.js, Express, React, Redux and PostgreSQL, along with computer science fundamentals.