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About Company
Company profile with story, timeline, and team.
Sean Merriam - Design Engineer
Making modern technology dead simple.
From Tanstack Start to custom content management systems built on Astro and neon; even solo developers benefit.
About
A design engineer for small teams and solo developers
I’m Sean Merriam. I design and build websites and web apps end to end, from the first sketch to a deployed, tested product.
My work sits between design and engineering. I build design systems and ship them in Astro and TanStack Start, with Neon Postgres behind anything that needs real data. That keeps decisions, components, and code in one place, with nothing lost in hand-off.
I care about the boring parts that make software last: accessible interfaces, fast pages, clear documentation, and repositories you can run and change yourself. Working with me means plain language, fixed scope, and no platform lock-in.
Services
Strategy, design, and development for modern web projects
Strategy
Most projects go sideways before a line of code is written: the scope is fuzzy, the stack was picked by habit, and nobody agreed on what “done” means. Strategy is the short, focused phase where I fix that.
I start with your users and constraints: who this is for, what they need to get done, and what your team can realistically maintain. From there I compare the real options for your stack and recommend one, with the trade-offs written down in plain language.
You leave with a scoped plan: pages and features ranked by value, a technical approach, and a timeline you can hold me to. For solo developers and small teams, it is often the cheapest work that gets done.
If you already have a half-built project, I can audit it instead: what to keep, what to rewrite, and what to cut.
What you get
- Discovery workshop and written project brief
- Stack recommendation: Astro, TanStack Start, or something simpler
- Content model and data architecture on Neon Postgres
- Prioritised roadmap with fixed-scope milestones
- Codebase and performance audit for existing projects
Design
Good interface design is mostly consistency: the same spacing, the same type scale, the same button everywhere. I build that into a design system first, so every page after the first one is faster to make and cheaper to change.
I work in Figma and in code at the same time. Layouts are composed from tokens and reusable components, so what you approve is what ships, with no hand-off gap and no drift between mockup and production.
Accessibility is part of the work, not a final pass. Contrast, focus states, motion preferences, and keyboard use are checked as each component is built, and the sample pages below include settings for exactly that.
The result is a site that looks considered, adapts to every screen size, and can be extended by anyone on your team without breaking it.
What you get
- Design tokens for colour, type, spacing, and radius
- Responsive page layouts: landing, dashboard, docs, settings
- A component library matched to your brand
- Light, dark, and high-contrast themes
- WCAG-minded accessibility review
Development
I build production sites and apps with Astro for content-led work and TanStack Start for application-style products, backed by Neon Postgres for data that needs to be queried, versioned, and branched.
For teams who edit content often, I build custom content management on the same stack: structured editors, media handling, and roles, so you aren’t paying for a platform you use a tenth of.
Everything is typed end to end, tested, and deployed through a pipeline you own. Pages ship little JavaScript by default, so they load fast on the devices your users actually have.
I document as I go and hand over a repository you can run, read, and change yourself, with or without me.
What you get
- Astro and TanStack Start applications in TypeScript
- Neon Postgres schema, migrations, and database branching
- Custom CMS, admin dashboards, and data tables
- Authentication, file uploads, and API routes
- Automated tests and a CI deploy pipeline
- Launch support and a handover walkthrough
Recent Work
Fourteen sample sites, from landing pages to admin tools