About
Junior Fortunato
Founder, Northwest Fortune Solutions · U.S. Army veteran · IT and compliance director · Hillsboro, Oregon
I build the software businesses run on, and I’m usually the only one building it. I ran my own software company for four years, until it was acquired. Now it’s a healthcare organization’s technology and compliance, and I still write the code myself — the only engineer, the only IT department, and the person who signs the audit, occasionally in the same week.
How I got here
I learned this job by being the only one who could do it.
I started in the Army, on the equipment that carries other people’s messages. Drone operations, ship navigation, submarine communications. You learn fast that “it worked yesterday” is not a status report.
When I got out in 2018 I started a software company, because I wanted to know if I could. I built a point-of-sale system, a customer database and a staff-management tool, and they ended up running on the counters of over fifty businesses. Then I ran the entire business around them — the servers, the security, the invoices, the marketing. Alone. For four years. Then it was acquired. Doing every job in a company teaches you which corners cost you later, and it’s usually the ones that felt like they’d save you an afternoon.
In 2022 I took over technology and compliance for a healthcare company that was still running on paper — a fax machine, and spreadsheets holding the medication schedules and the timesheets. I moved it to the cloud and rebuilt every process it had around the software. Admin paperwork takes about 40% less time than it did.
That company can’t afford downtime. So I learned to build things that don’t break — and to explain them to people who don’t code. That’s the whole job, really.
That second half is the part most engineers skip. If the nurse can’t use it, it doesn’t work. If the auditor can’t follow it, it doesn’t count. And if I’m the only one who understands it, then what I’ve actually built is a liability with a nice interface.
Northwest Fortune Solutions is me doing that work under my own name, for people outside my day job.
What I actually do
A normal week.
Roughly half my week is the director job. The team, the technology budget, the vendors, the security. And the compliance work: the written procedures, the checks we have to prove we run, and the paperwork that has to exist before an inspector asks for it, not after.
The other half I’m writing code, and I’ve been doing that alongside AI coding assistants every day for about three years. That part’s worth being precise about, because a lot of people are vague about it: the agents are fast hands. Every decision about what to build, what to refuse, and what the risk is stays mine. If I can’t explain why a line of code is there, it comes out.
I also point them at my own finished work and tell them to break it. That’s how I found the two privacy bugs I’m proudest of catching — in code I had already convinced myself was fine.
And I answer the phone. If something’s broken I’m not filing a ticket with somebody else. I’m the one fixing it.
None of that is glamorous. All of it is the job.
- Design a screen someone will stare at for six hours a day, and make it not annoying.
- Write the rules for who’s allowed to see what, then spend an afternoon trying to break them.
- Fix the thing that broke at 8:40pm, then write down why, so it stops being interesting.
- Sit with someone non-technical and turn “it’s doing the thing again” into a bug I can actually find.
- Get ready for an audit that’s six weeks out, by having already done it.
- Point AI at a problem and then check its work.
Service
The Army part, briefly.
Senior Wideband Controller, U.S. Army, July 2014 to January 2018. That’s the person who keeps satellite and radio communications up. I ran comms for missions that couldn’t afford to lose the link — drone operations, maritime navigation, submarine communications. I set up the networking and the whole radio chain, and I qualified across six critical positions. That’s how I became my unit’s youngest senior controller.
I’m not going to inflate that into a leadership philosophy. Here’s the honest carryover. I check my own work like somebody hostile is going to check it next. I write things down so the person after me isn’t guessing. And I get calmer when something’s on fire, rather than louder.
That’s it. That’s the whole transfer.
Where I’ve worked
Three jobs, in order.
IT & Compliance Director
a healthcare operations companyApril 2022 to now
I took a company off paper and built the system it runs on, starting from nothing: client intake, scheduling, care records, proof that visits happened, billing preparation. I still maintain it.
Leadership went from asking for reports to just looking. I own compliance as well as technology, so the record of who did what was in the first version rather than bolted on after somebody asked.
I manage the team, the technology budget, the vendors, and all of the security and the systems it runs on.
Founder & Lead Developer
Horizon AuthenticationJanuary 2018 to April 2022
I started a software company and was its only engineer for four years. Point-of-sale, customer records, staff management — shipped, paid for, and in daily use in over fifty businesses.
The feature people actually paid for was one I designed: a way to route their own data securely through our servers instead of exposing their systems directly.
I also did the books and the marketing, which is an education in its own right.
It was acquired. That’s how the four years ended — not with me switching the servers off.
Senior Wideband Controller
U.S. ArmyJuly 2014 to January 2018
Communications for missions where losing the link was not an option.
Toolbox
The tools, for the people who scan for them.
A list, not a personality. If you’re matching keywords, this section is yours — and if you’re not, skip it, you’ve lost nothing.
- Languages
- C#, TypeScript, Python, Go, SQL
- The server side
- .NET and ASP.NET Core, NestJS, FastAPI, Go with the Chi router, Entity Framework Core
- The screens people use
- Angular, React, TypeScript, Bootstrap and SCSS for styling, Vite for the build
- Live updates, so a screen refreshes itself
- SignalR, WebSockets
- Where the data lives, and how it’s shaped
- PostgreSQL, MySQL, designing the tables and making them fast to search, managed databases on Amazon’s cloud
- Running it in the cloud
- Amazon Web Services (app containers, which are self-contained packages of a running app; managed databases; a delivery network that serves files from near your users; a web firewall; and traffic spread across several servers), Azure, Google Cloud, Terraform, Docker and Compose, nginx, Caddy
- Getting changes out without breaking anything
- GitHub Actions, releases with no long-lived cloud keys stored anywhere, a list of every third-party package in the build, automatic checks for known-vulnerable packages, required reviewers on the sensitive files
- Proving it works
- xUnit, Testcontainers, Jasmine, Vitest, and Playwright, which drives a real browser through the app the way a person would
- Sign-in and permissions
- Google and Microsoft sign-in, session cookies the browser’s scripts can’t read, permission systems, limits on how often anyone can hammer the door, audit logging
- AI
- Claude, OpenAI Codex, Google Gemini, prompt design, and a layer of my own so a project isn’t married to one vendor
Everything on this list is something I’ve shipped and then had to keep running, not something I read about. If you want to know how I chose between any two of them, that’s on the how-I-build page.
Education
I don’t have a degree.
I went from school straight into the Army in 2014, and I’ve been working ever since. There was never a year in which I wasn’t responsible for something.
What I know, I learned while it counted: three and a half years on communications equipment where losing the link was not an option, four more running a company where every job in it was mine, and the years since building and operating the systems a healthcare business depends on to get paid. Nobody graded any of it. It either worked on the day or it didn’t, and I was the one who found out.
If a degree is a hard requirement on your side, better we both know that now than in a third interview. If it’s a proxy for whether I can do the work, the rest of this page is the evidence, and I’d rather be read on that.
That’s the long version.
If you’d rather just ask me things, that’s usually quicker.