About me

I am Manuel Haller Polo, an independent engineer based in Basel, Switzerland. I started in 2013 with an internship in web development — and web development has been my profession continuously ever since, now for over twelve years.Before that I completed an apprenticeship as an electronics technician (Swiss EFZ) at the JAQUET Technology Group in Basel. That was not a detour: the habit of looking at systems that have to actually work, rather than merely present well, comes from those years.

How I work

I am a senior generalist with three sharp specialisms: modern frontend, AI and automation, blockchain and Web3. That combination rarely comes together in one person, and it is exactly where the value lies — I can build a web application, extend it meaningfully with a language model, and connect it to a chain where that is warranted, without three parties having to explain to each other what they are doing.Part of the job, for me, is saying no. If a blockchain is the wrong approach for your case, I will say so before the quote rather than after. The same goes for a repair that would cost more than a rebuild.

Career

At Winterthur Medien AG I built frontends with Tailwind, Vue.js and Nuxt, developed backends and APIs with Node.js, and wrote smart contracts in Solidity using Hardhat and ethers.js, deploying them to EVM chains — within a Scrum team running daily stand-ups and sprint planning.At WONDROUS the focus was Vue 2 and 3, Nuxt with server-side rendering and SEO, CMS integration via Drupal and Storyblok, and building and maintaining reusable design systems and styleguides.

A blockchain focus

Nine of my fourteen credentials are in blockchain and DeFi. For a profile that came up through frontend, that is an unusually deep and formally documented specialisation — and the reason I can build on-chain projects myself rather than merely supervise them.

The business

I trade as the registered sole proprietorship Manuel Haller Polo, based in Basel, UID CHE-216.461.477, active in both the UID and the VAT register. You can check the entry at any time in the Swiss federal UID registry.