About me
I'm Colin Longworth, a fractional CTO and founder of WooNinja. I started my career in Dublin, spending 4+ years leading the SAP Hybris engineering team for EMEA, working across Europe, Canada, the US, Mexico, and China. I moved to Canada and founded WooNinja in 2017, building custom Thinkific integrations, WordPress plugins, and SaaS products for course creators and enterprise clients. Today I work as a fractional CTO, combining enterprise-scale engineering discipline with hands-on product building.
Background
I grew up in Dublin and studied engineering and business at University College Dublin. After graduate school, I joined SAP Ireland, eventually leading the EMEA Hybris Commerce Cloud VPR team, implementing large-scale commerce systems across continents. That experience gave me a deep understanding of enterprise architecture, vendor ecosystems, and the gap between how software should work and how it often does. I moved to Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, founded WooNinja, and never looked back.
Education
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MSc in Management, Management
University College Dublin, Michael Smurfit School of Business
2015 – 2017Modules include: Management and Organisation Behaviour, Marketing Management, Human Resource Management, Corporate Finance, Economics & Accounting Information for Managers.
Thesis: An Analysis of Geographically Distributed Agile Methodology in the Information Technology Sector
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Master of Engineering (M.Eng.), Electronic and Computer Engineering
University College Dublin
2009 – 2014Undertook the pilot Engineering Science program, completing the BSc Engineering course before immediately undertaking the final two years of the Masters program. Developed a strong interest in software modules complimenting personal hobby interest in iOS and software design, alongside hardware implementation projects throughout the course.
Credentials
- Accredited Thinkific Expert
- Professional & Lifelong Engineer
- 20+ WordPress plugins published
- Founded WooNinja (2017)
- Co-founder of Actionbooker & Highways.io
- Fin (formerly Intercom) Partner
- Former SAP Hybris VPR Lead, EMEA
How I build
I've been building software since 2006, starting with hand-coded HTML and CSS, spending years on enterprise SAP systems, and building modern SaaS products with Laravel, Livewire, and Tailwind CSS. Here's how that journey shaped the way I work.
Hand-coded from the start
I built my first website in 2006, plain HTML and CSS, no frameworks, no build tools. Just a text editor and a browser. That foundation taught me how the web actually works: the DOM, the box model, HTTP request-response, and why semantic markup matters. I carried that through university (M.Eng Electronic Engineering, UCD) and into my first professional work. Every abstraction I've used since sits on those fundamentals.
SAP Hybris at global scale
I joined SAP in 2015, working on Hybris Commerce Cloud for EMEA, leading implementations across Europe, Canada, the US, Mexico, and China. That experience shaped how I think about architecture: multi-region deployments, vendor ecosystems, SSO integrations, and the gap between how enterprise software should work and how it often does. I also started building on WordPress in this period, laying the groundwork for WooNinja.
Full-stack SaaS with Laravel
I adopted Laravel in 2018 for new product development and haven't looked back. Laravel's ecosystem (Eloquent, queues, broadcasting, the package system) lets me build SaaS products that would have taken months in a few weeks. I pair it with Livewire for reactive UI without writing JavaScript, and Tailwind CSS for design that's fast to iterate and consistent across projects. This stack powers everything from B2B dashboards to multi-tenant platforms to field operations software.
Enterprise patterns, pragmatic delivery
My SAP experience taught me enterprise architecture at global scale. Now I apply that discipline to smaller, faster teams as a fractional CTO: multi-tenant SaaS design, API-first architecture, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure that doesn't need a dedicated ops team. I use Cloudflare for edge delivery, Hetzner for cost-effective compute, and deploy on Laravel Forge. The result is production software that scales without enterprise complexity.
That's the short version. Every project starts with understanding the problem, then picking the right tools, not the other way around. Whether it's a WordPress plugin, an SAP integration, or a multi-tenant SaaS platform, the process is the same: ship something solid, iterate based on real use, and keep the stack boring enough that you sleep well at night.
Skills
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