Anyone can claim to be an up-and-coming AI engineer. Here are my receipts instead.
"Up and coming." "Promising." "One to watch." Every job board and every LinkedIn feed is full of people describing themselves with adjectives. I do not want to do that, because adjectives are unverifiable noise. So this post is something else: my first year of building in public, in receipts, with
"Up and coming." "Promising." "One to watch." Every job board and every LinkedIn feed is full of people describing themselves with adjectives. I do not want to do that, because adjectives are unverifiable noise. So this post is something else: my first year of building in public, in receipts, with links. Judge the trajectory, not the adjectives.
2022 — the degree, done at night. I started a BSc in Computing and IT with the Open University while working full time. I finished it in 2026. Not a receipt for talent — a receipt for stubbornness, which is more reliable anyway.
2025 — n8n templates that run in production. I built a set of workflow templates for n8n and put them to work. The alert monitor has run 1,892 times at 99.7% success. Lead qualification: 247 runs, 99.2%. Data sync: 312 runs, 97.8%. They are open source: n8n-automation-templates. A template that runs weekly for months without you touching it is worth more than any certificate.
2026 — the job search engine. I automated my own job hunt: 30+ ATS boards, deduplication against every posting I have ever seen, hard rule filters before any LLM call, then LLM scoring against my honest profile. Over 1,500 postings evaluated this year; 1,539 parked; 12 apply-worthy. Public and scrubbed: remote-job-engine and job-sweep. The full story is on dev.to, and auf Deutsch too.
September 2026 — the quality wave. One month, four repos, all with tests: a composable ETL framework (errors as data, whitelist mapping, CI), a SQL playground (55 templates, 115 tests, now a live demo ), a file automation toolkit (20 tests), and a finance analytics dashboard. The lesson post is here.
October 2026 — the paper trail. Three technical articles, a bilingual portfolio site, and a live demo instead of dead links. You are reading the third article.
Build things you actually use. My n8n templates monitor services I care about. My job engine found the shortlist I am actually working through. Tools you use daily cannot fake it.
Tests or it did not happen. Every framework repo has a test suite. The SQL playground has 115 tests that execute all 55 templates. This is not rigour for its own sake — it is the difference between "code exists" and "code works."
Write it down. The articles are not marketing. They are the honest lessons, including the ones that cost me: six perfect-looking job candidates that died when I read the actual posting bodies.
I have no professional software engineering title yet. Thirteen years in operations — Lloyds Banking Group, Deutsche Post, sysadmin, currently Amazon print production — and a degree, and all the receipts above, and no job title in software. That is the next receipt, and it is the one I cannot publish myself. Someone has to give it to me.
If your team needs a junior or associate who already works like this — AI, automation, or data, fully remote from Germany or UK — everything is on reaver1000.github.io. The receipts are the résumé. The next one is yours to write.