Open to UK-remote contract work

Carl Halstead.NET Software Engineer

I build backend systems, APIs and complete web applications with .NET and Blazor. I’m particularly interested in UK-remote contract opportunities where I can own problems from investigation through delivery.

View my work Get in touchLinkedIn

Selected work

Products built with purpose.

Two projects that turn considered engineering into useful, deliberately focused software.

Connected .NET product suite

PlatformFlow

An ad-free .NET product suite for planning and collaboration, built around a free core with optional paid features that add genuine value.

PlatformFlow grew out of Pokify after I wanted a cleaner alternative to planning-poker tools crowded with ads or locked behind expensive subscriptions. As Planify joined the platform, the interesting challenge became deciding what identity, APIs and platform capabilities should be shared without blurring product boundaries.

Engineering case study

Product boundaries
Expanding Pokify into PlatformFlow and adding Planify meant designing shared capabilities while keeping product-specific behaviour isolated.
Secure service communication
Internal APIs use mutual TLS (mTLS), my first implementation of service-to-service certificate authentication in this kind of architecture.
Agent integration
I added my first MCP server so the same agentic tools I use while developing can interact directly with PlatformFlow.
  • .NET
  • Blazor
  • mTLS
  • MCP
Visit PlatformFlow
Pokify keeps a realistic product backlog visible while the team estimates the selected story.

Local-first browser extension

Clayform

A local-first Chrome extension for stripping away interface clutter and reshaping the sites I use around the features that matter.

Inspired by customisation tools I used years ago, Clayform deliberately stays focused: no accounts, telemetry or arbitrary CSS or JavaScript, with per-site permissions and changes stored locally. The constraints are intentional. Security matters, but so does resisting feature creep.

  • Local-first
  • Restrained design
  • Chrome extension
View in Chrome Web Store
Edit mode makes safe visual changes directly on the page, without writing CSS.

Commercial experience

Production software since 2021.

I’ve worked across large B2B applications, legacy systems and integration-heavy areas where the problem often needs investigating before the implementation is clear.

Current role

StarCompliance

Software Engineer

My current role. For full employment history and current-role details, see LinkedIn.

View LinkedIn

2021–2025

Point74

Junior Web Developer → Web Developer

Maintained and extended large B2B production applications and took technical ownership of an inbound data-integration area consuming Oracle Retail Brand Compliance APIs for supplier and wider business data.

Worked directly with customers, QA and analysts to turn unclear requirements and defects into investigated, scoped and delivered solutions.

Contributed to incremental modernisation as areas were touched, moving JavaScript toward TypeScript and Web Forms toward Vue while maintaining extensive JSON mapping definitions for complex domain transformations and customer-specific fields.

How I work

Own the problem, not just the ticket.

I’m comfortable starting from an unclear proposal or issue, gathering context from the people involved and carrying the work through implementation and validation.

  • Improve pragmatically. Years with legacy production systems taught me to modernise incrementally when that is safer than rewriting.
  • Automate deliberately. I use agentic workflows for planning, implementation and test generation, with automated tests providing guardrails.
  • Keep systems focused. I value clear boundaries, restrained products and avoiding feature creep.

Core stack

  • .NET
  • C#
  • ASP.NET Core
  • Entity Framework Core (EF Core)
  • APIs
  • Blazor
  • SQL Server
  • MCP
  • NUnit & NSubstitute
  • Playwright
  • GitHub Actions & Azure DevOps
  • Legacy .NET / Web Forms