Cover letter

John Montgomery · EdenFintech · Mossel Bay, South Africa support@edenfintech.com · +27 079 177 1970

I’ve been writing code for money since the early 2000s. The first thing I built was a set of trading “bots” for a trading company, which feels relevant again now: 22 years of programming later, the current work is a screening and AI-review pipeline for US-listed equities, productised as EdenFintech. The long middle of that arc was 20+ years of WordPress, WooCommerce, and custom PHP under the legacy YourDesign name, plus agency sub-contracts including the Woolworths Mother’s Day campaign (via Flume) and the Nimue Skin Technology brand build.

What I bring to a project is the habit of treating the scaffolding as the asset. On the quant research platforms, that means confidence-adjusted metrics, walk-forward as a gate rather than a chart, MD5-hashed data snapshots, and a linear pipeline you can read top-to-bottom. On the AI side, LLM calls sit behind a typed adapter, the reviewer role is blocked from seeing scores at the dataclass level, every call is logged with content-hash dedup. The model is one replaceable piece, not the centre of gravity. On the WordPress side, I’ll put operational data in a proper Postgres schema and enforce invariants in plpgsql triggers rather than re-implementing them in PHP that can be uninstalled.

The other thing worth saying upfront: when a research project runs its course and the answer is “there isn’t enough edge”, I write the postmortem in the repo. apes-signal and InsiderSignalResearch are both shelved research projects with written conclusions. I’d rather publish a shelving than pretend. That stance turns up on the decisions page if you want the longer version.

What I’m most useful for right now:

• Building or rescuing a quant research platform: ingestion, snapshot hashing, YAML configs, CLI, structured logging, walk-forward as a gate.
• Retrofitting an existing LLM call with typed contracts, provider-agnostic adapters, and logging.
• Long-running custom WordPress / WooCommerce work, especially if the schema needs to outgrow $wpdb.
• Obsidian-to-Quartz knowledge graphs for research topics or case-study work, in the signaltrace-site pattern.

How I work: solo or lead on small teams; remote, UTC+2; a bias toward linear code and fewer dependencies; a preference for shipping with honest postmortems when honest postmortems are the right answer.

Happy to start with a short call. Contact details above.

John