I’m Dang Nguyen Hai — most people call me Mark. I’m a senior fullstack engineer in Ho Chi Minh City with 13+ years building e-commerce backends, payment systems, and lately the AI features bolted onto both.
These days I’m embedded with a German enterprise client (Shopware) as a forward-deployed engineer, which is a long way of saying I sit with the business people, work out what they actually need, and then go build it. Before that I led a monolith-to-microservices migration for a clinical diagnostics lab that took result processing from about three hours down to about three minutes, and ran backend for a multi-tenant AI translation platform.
I hold a Master’s in Software Engineering, with a thesis on facial expression recognition using CNNs — which is how the AI interest started, well before it was fashionable.
How it started
I grew up in suburban Hanoi. When I was twelve our family got its first computer and I fell in love immediately. I begged my parents for a subscription to Echip, the only computer magazine in Vietnam at the time, and read it cover to cover. The internet reached our house in 2008 and I disappeared into Yahoo! Chat, Google, and Pascal.
The rest of the résumé from that era is less distinguished:
- 2005: Destroyed one hard drive, one motherboard, one DVD drive. Got beaten more than three times.
- 2007: Stole from the piggy bank to buy my first USB flash drive (it had a little light on it). Got caught. Got beaten.
- 2010: Became a moderator of the Joomla! board on ITVNN, then the largest IT forum in Vietnam — and started earning actual money building websites.
PHP got me eventually and never really let go. I forsook Pascal without regret.
This blog
I write here about the things I run into at work — Laravel and PHP internals, e-commerce architecture, and how to make AI features behave in production. Some posts are in Vietnamese, some in English, depending on who I had in mind that day. If something here is useful, or wrong, or you just want to argue about it, leave a comment. I read all of them.
Working together
I take on a limited amount of freelance and contract work — mostly e-commerce backend, integrations, and AI features for products that already have users. Here’s what that looks like and how to reach me →
Elsewhere
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mark-nguyen-4027458b
Email: markng1993@gmail.com