Tiago Pires

The Cathedral — Work

I have been building for the web professionally since 2007, and I came to computers by way of typewriters — by grade six I had graduated from an Imperial 55 to an electric, and the only screens I owned belonged to a Super Nintendo and a PlayStation. I started school early, so high school arrived at twelve, and with it my first computer: a 486DX, onto which I installed Visual Basic 3.1 from a massive stack of floppies. At thirteen, on the family Compaq under Windows 98, I started writing HTML — DHTML in Notepad — and learning Flash and Paint Shop Pro. At fourteen I changed schools and finished the year’s HTML curriculum before the second class came around, having already taught it to myself on the Compaq; that year I built my first machine from a budget AMD Duron, overclocked it, and — armed at last with real dialup and a CD burner — started slowly downloading operating systems: Red Hat, and a BeOS R5 demo disc from a magazine. You are looking at what that disc became. Nobody taught me this trade.

The agency years — Melbourne, then Berlin

I came up through the Melbourne agency circuit: web producer at bwired, webmaster for the ANZCA College of Anaesthetists, front-end contractor at CPM Australia and Arkade building responsive WordPress builds with full social integration back when that was hard, new media artist with Western Edge Youth Arts. Then I moved to Berlin, my home for almost five years, and from there worked remotely with Inspiral in London from 2012 to 2016 — heading up WooCommerce PHP front-end development and building world-standard eCommerce for UK and Australian clients, including the transition to a full WooCommerce-based online organic supermarket.

I worked on Nintendo of Australia’s website, back in the Wii era. The dream arrived and then it came apart. One day I couldn’t finish the day. Before lunch I walked into the CEO’s office: “Sam, I’m sorry, I have to go now. I just can’t stay any longer.” He asked if I had somewhere else to go. I said no. He said okay then. We said our goodbyes and I was dismissed. When I finally flew to the Amazon, it was with no reservations, in either sense.

The luminaries — 2008 to 2024

Alongside all of that, for fifteen years I ran my own practice building and running the digital presence of people whose work I believed in: spiritual teachers, Amazonian maestros, visionary artists, scientists. Not as a vendor. As lineage service, from inside the relationships.

  • Dr. Baskaran Pillai (Dattatreya Siva Baba) — eCommerce and four years of social media and funnel work for Pillai Academy Mind Science, Germany
  • Maestro Don Jose Campos (Centro Munay) — I built donjosecampos.com while training under him in Peru
  • Dr. Dennis McKenna — Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss book launch
  • Visionario Anderson Debernardi — Debernardi Vision, original paintings and prints
  • Maestro Roger Bardales Romaina (Centro Mukanranko) and Maestro Sergio Castro Maldonado (Centro Inkanima)

From 2015 to 2019 I ran cloud-based collaborative infrastructure (Nextcloud) for spiritual communities across Europe out of Spirit Berlin — sovereign tooling for people who should not be handing their communities to Facebook.

The maps — Colombia, 2020

With The Care for Creation Foundation I spent six months bridging indigenous communities, permaculture design and open source GIS. The communities were relying on disintegrating analogue maps to protect their sacred sites. We built community-driven interactive maps accurate to under a metre — modern cartography in service of their spiritual ethos, maintainable by them, owned by them.

The marketplace — 2018 to 2024

Six years as Senior Technology Officer at Natural Stone Hub, Australia: 24/7 production support across every company system, AWS Linux DevOps for Odoo, Magento and WordPress, and project management across Node.js, Angular and Odoo Python teams. I engineered and project-managed the Stone Hub digital marketplace from scratch, and once launched a complete Odoo store with working merchant gateways for a newly acquired company in one week, in the run-up to Christmas. It held.

Now

In 2024 I scaled down on purpose. I am not job seeking and I am not a body shop. I run a sovereign independent practice — web, hosting, infrastructure, and increasingly agentic systems — for aligned clients only: people and projects I actually believe in. The stack I run it on is in the Armory; the way I live with it is in the Sanctuaries.

If that describes you, write to me: tiago@tiagopires.com.