Jon Arbell
Software Engineer
I'm Jon — a software engineer and the CTO and Co-Founder of GIJON Tech. Most of what I make sits underneath the buttons rather than on them, quietly holding an app together while the visible parts take all the credit. I build those visible parts too, which is mostly what stops me handing over something that looks finished and behaves badly. None of it came quickly: government training courses, months of studying around a full-time job, two national certificates, and a great many practice projects nobody asked for. What keeps me interested is the moment a messy problem finally goes quiet.
About
I build software from end to end, and I'm happiest working out of sight — where an app quietly keeps your information, checks it, and hands it back the moment you ask for it.
It Started With One Small Program That Worked
I still remember the first program I ever got working. It was a plain black screen with a few lines of text on it — nothing anyone would have paid for — but I had told a machine what to do and it had listened, and that was enough to change what I wanted to do with my life. I spent the months after that working out how information should move through a system: where it gets kept, who is allowed to touch it, and what ought to happen when something goes wrong. That turned into my final school project, a small tool that reads the links in your email and warns you when one of them looks like a trap.
My first real job was on the visible side, building the screens and dashboards people click through every day. I learned it quickly, mostly because I had no choice — it was a live product with real users on it, and there is no gentler way to learn than that. A few months in I asked to move to the team working behind the scenes, and they let me. That meant learning a coding language I had never written a single line of; I was building real features with it inside a month, and stayed eight months at that company across the two teams.
Since then I have drifted further behind the scenes, which is where I am most useful. I have looked after the machines and accounts that keep things online, built a shop checkout system from nothing just to see whether I could carry the whole thing myself, and worked on the invisible half of a mobile app — everything that happens in the gap between someone tapping a button and the right answer coming back. That independent contract ended on October 1, 2026. I set up and looked after its servers as well, so keeping the thing standing was part of my job too.
GIJON Tech began with three of us who believed technology should be accessible, practical, and useful to everyone. In April 2026, we turned that belief into GIJON Tech Software Development Solutions, where I help guide the technical direction. Even the name GIJON comes from our names. We want to help businesses and communities feel more confident using technology in their everyday work, so I built our company website as a first place to share that idea.
What's Next
Short term
Get better at the invisible half — building things that still make sense a year later, when the app has grown in ways nobody planned for, and running them somewhere I properly understand.
Long term
I've already taken the first step by co-founding GIJON Tech. Now I want to grow it with my co-founders — build a team we can rely on, deliver software people actually use, and earn the trust of businesses and communities one project at a time.