Hey! I'm Rowan Petrov and I mostly delete code for a living.

I have been taking things apart since I was nine, when I discovered that the family computer had screws and that screws come out. Nobody was thrilled. Twenty years later the habit is a job title: I go into systems that grew faster than anyone planned and I find the parts that can leave.

When I am not chasing a regression I am usually cooking something too spicy for the people I cooked it for, or losing an argument about tabs with my brother. I believe firmly that a good laugh and a hot sauce fix almost anything, bugs regrettably excluded.

Here's a timeline of what I've been up to.

2025

Started a small consultancy on the side, this time with a written scope

Wrote every weekday for a year and finally stopped hating my own drafts

Learned to sail badly and to dock a boat only slightly better

2024

Promoted to staff engineer and immediately inherited the build system

Gave my first conference talk without reading from the notes

Ran a half marathon, walked most of the second half

2023

Moved countries with two suitcases and one very unhappy houseplant

Joined Apple to work on developer tooling full time

Released the first version of Latticeboard to eleven very patient users

2022

Bought the laptop I still use and broke the screen inside a fortnight

Shipped a billing rewrite that nobody noticed, which is the point

Started a podcast with a friend and recorded exactly four episodes

2021

Left robotics for infrastructure and never looked back for long

Built a side project that helped a local clinic manage appointments

Read forty books, remembered maybe six of them

2020

Finished a masters in distributed systems, mostly over a bad connection

Learned to cook properly because there was nowhere else to go

Won a family tournament of a very old puzzle game, still disputed