Hugo Marinho
Fit or Pass
Tells you honestly whether a job is worth applying for. Two modes: a quick verdict, and an agent.
I help people understand technical products. In my own time, I build them.
Customer Engineer in Basel, Switzerland. Demos, onboarding and technical enablement by day. Everything further down this page I designed, built and shipped myself, outside work, with AI.
- 570+documented demos and calls
- 1,300+technical cases resolved
- 98%+top rating across 900+ responses, none negative
- 100k+devices in the largest customer estates
Documented at Patch My PC, 2023 to now.
Client work
Anna Borovska Dance
A dance studio in Basel runs on this. Anna teaches, and between classes she takes attendance, sells passes and checks whether the month paid for itself, all from her phone. Her students book, cancel and check in from theirs. It replaced a paper notebook. AI writes the code. I decide what it should do, use it until something breaks, and fix that.
The app is shown on a practice copy, never on her records. Everyone in it is made up, down to the surnames and a phone country code that does not exist.
What her students see
- Their pass, and how many classes are left on it
- Booking a place, cancelling it, or pausing everything while they are away
- A code to scan at the studio, so they check themselves in
- All of it in English, German or Ukrainian
What Anna does with it
- Work that took her days on paper now takes seconds. She says the app has saved her hundreds of hours
- Takes the register with one tap per person, standing in the room
- Sells a pass in two taps and records how it was paid, including in parts
- Opens the app to a short list of what still needs doing, and it empties as she gets through it
- Sees whether a class actually covered the cost of the room it ran in
Her website
- Timetable, prices and workshops come straight from the app, so she only changes them once
- She writes her own words, in all three languages
- She sees how many people visited, with no cookies and no IP addresses stored
How I keep it safe to change
- Nothing reaches her students until it has run on a copy first, with made-up people and email switched off
- Every change to her data is written down once and never edited afterwards, so last year's numbers never move
- Passwords are stored in a form nobody can read back, mine included
- Her students' records stay in the EU, and deleting someone removes their details without breaking her books
Flagship project
Wastrel
A daily deck-building card-fight that runs in the browser. Everyone in the world gets the exact same run each day, so the only thing separating two scores is how you played it. No install, no account, a few minutes a go.
What I did
- Product direction and the core design decision: one shared daily run, which is what makes scores comparable and gives people a reason to come back
- How it feels to play, from the first screen to the score you share at the end of a run
- Art direction for the whole cast and card set
- Positioning, the analytics, and changing the game based on what the numbers and the playtesters actually said
Shipped features daily shared challenge leaderboard and run replays live 1v1 multiplayer
Real gameplay
Selected work
Other things I have shipped
Each of these started as a question I wanted answered. They are live, and they are the size of thing one person can build with AI, rather than a team.
Is This A Scam
Paste a message that smells off, get a plain-language verdict, in ten languages.
The claim False
$21,000
a wallet quietly printing money on Bitcoin markets
What it actually made
$1,125.68 after fees
The strategy, replayed
+$7.850 ms, physically impossible
Two hours of live paper trading, $100 a go, the same decisions filled at six network delays.
0 ms and 40 ms are identical because the order book does not tick in between, so both orders fill against the same snapshot.
Polymarket microstructure research
A viral post claimed a wallet was a bot making $21k on Bitcoin markets. I rebuilt it from public data to check.
Layover
A survival game set in the airport of a delayed flight. One thumb, works offline, made for a phone.
Try one
Neon Run
An endless runner that runs right here, in this page. Jump the red blocks, grab a shield and smash through them instead. Scores go to a global board. It takes about twenty seconds to find out if you are any good.
Space or tap to jump, twice for a double jump. Esc to leave.
Experience
13 years in IT. The last three selling to it.
Most of that was internal work: service desks, network integration, keeping other people's device fleets running. The people I demo to now are the people I used to be, and that is most of why those conversations go well.
Customer Engineer
Patch My PC
2023 to now · Switzerland
- Moved a 60,000 device customer onto our cloud product on Intune. I demoed it live, then walked their team through the rollout and the handover
- Technical pre-sales: discovery, tailored demos, and helping organisations work out whether the product fits the environment they already have
- Setup calls, environment reviews and the implementation work after they sign, so what they bought actually ends up running
- Find customers using a fraction of what they already bought, show them the rest, and turn it into something they use every day
- Translate technical capability into business value, for the engineers and the executives in the same conversation
- Handle technical objections, including the ones where the honest answer is that we are not the right fit
- Bring the things customers keep asking for back to Product and Engineering
- Speaker at Cloud Tech Tallinn, MEM Summit Paris, DTX Manchester and Workplace Ninja Norway
- 2022 to 2023IT Support SpecialistMDPI
- 2021 to 2022IT TechnicianInstitute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel
- 2019 to 2021IT Office ManagerVolkswagen Digital Solutions
- 2017 to 2018Network Integration EngineerNokia
- 2015 to 20172nd Level IT SupportSAP
- 2014 to 2015Customer SuccessPHC Software, SaaS and ERP product demonstrations
- 2013 to 2014Telecommunications TechnicianNokia Solutions and Networks, Lisbon
About
Portuguese, in Basel.
I trained in systems management and programming, then spent a decade inside IT teams rather than writing code for a living. The last three years have been spent in front of the people deciding whether to buy the tools. That second half is the one that helps when you go and build something yourself.
I am interested in products, in AI, and in how businesses actually make money. I build things because I like taking an idea the whole way to something real that strangers can use, and because doing it myself is the fastest way to understand what shipping actually costs.
Contact
Say hello.
I like talking about technical products, how they actually get adopted, and what building with AI is really like once you are past the demo. If any of that is your world, my inbox is open.
- Email[email protected]
- LinkedInlinkedin.com/in/hugom
- GitHubgithub.com/hugompt