fabricaFractional CTO
I help early-stage teams build great products.
I'm Ken Ono. For almost four decades I've worked hands-on with founders — from architecture and hiring to writing code. I go deep with a small number of clients on hard, interesting problems.
What I do
Hands-on building
Full-stack architecture and development. React, Node, AWS, GraphQL — I ship code alongside your team, not just advise from the sidelines.
Technical leadership
CTO-level strategy for teams that aren't ready for a full-time CTO hire. Technology roadmaps, vendor selection, architectural decisions.
Team building
Recruiting, assessing, and "right-sizing" engineering teams. I've built high-performing teams from scratch and turned around struggling ones.
AI adoption
Your team's already using AI, but everyone's doing it differently. A short, fixed-scope assessment of how product, design, QA, and engineering use it — plus a baseline, a playbook, and a workshop to get the whole team faster.
Recent writing
- Delete or Tweak Your Skills to See How Well They WorkJun 25, 2026
The papers say agent context files cost more and don't reliably help — but the honest answer depends on your repo and your model. Here's a cheap way to measure your own setup, using features you're already shipping.
- Your Local Dev Environment Needs an APIJun 11, 2026
Process-compose and a thin wrapper gave my local dev stack one control plane for humans and agents — real readiness, structured status, and parallel worktrees without port collisions.
- An Evidence-First Scorecard for AI EngineeringMay 22, 2026
An evidence-first AI engineering scorecard for small teams: have the agent inspect the repo, workflow evidence, automations, and agent instructions before asking humans how mature they feel.