About

I'm Valentine Rogers, a full-stack engineer based in Massachusetts. I've been building web applications since 2012, mostly in Ruby on Rails and React/TypeScript, and I've been a first engineering hire twice. Right now I'm looking for senior, staff, or leadership roles at remote-friendly companies where the work matters and the team trusts each other to make good decisions and work independently.

I also run Dunwell Labs, my own product studio, where I build and ship things end to end: architecture, code, and the parts that come after launch.

Most of the problems we deal with, individually and as a society, come down to too few people holding the power, responsibility, and resources that should be available to everyone. Technology, built and applied with intention, is one of the best tools we have for changing that.

The more people who hold real ownership and power, the more resilient things become, whether that's a company, a community, or a family. The more tools individual people and small organizations have to serve the people around them, the more that responsibility gets spread out instead of concentrated in a few hands.

This shows up in the work I choose. I look for projects that give people more control over their own tools and their own data, and I try to work with companies whose business model reflects that same intention.

I started in healthcare data at Arcadia, building ETL pipelines and quality improvement tools for clinics. From there I spent time as the first engineering hire at two different companies, OfferLogic and Ampion, setting technical direction and working culture from the ground up at each.

That led me to CarePort, where I led the Accelerate team, a group built after an acquisition to serve as the technical implementation team, building tools for both the technical and non-technical sides of client onboarding. We helped scale a small group into an organization that could handle ten times the go-lives with the same headroom for mistakes. I've mentored engineers directly throughout, paired through hard problems, and helped teams figure out how to grow while holding onto what made them good in the first place. Building from scratch and helping something already in motion scale well are different skills, and having done both taught me a lot about what actually matters versus what just looks good on paper.

For the last several years I've split my time between consulting, most recently at The Gnar Company, and building my own products through Dunwell Labs.

Dunwell Labs is where the values above turn into actual software.

Kumbuku is a personal operating system for intentional living. It helps people clarify what they value, commit to how they want to grow, and stay accountable to that through daily practice. It's the project where I get to build exactly the kind of tool I believe in: something that hands a person more ownership over their own direction, not less.

WayBetterLists is a collaborative list app for families, live on the App Store. It's a smaller, more contained problem than Kumbuku, but it forced good judgment in different ways, like building a duplicate-aware merge protocol so a shared grocery list doesn't turn into a mess when two people add milk at the same time, or designing real-time sync so everyone sees who checked off what without anyone needing to ask.

I'm open to both individual contributor and people-management tracks. I do my best work close to the problem and the people affected by it, in teams that give engineers real ownership over what they build and treat mentorship and peer learning as part of the job. If that sounds like your team, I'd like to talk.