🔸Unpacking Software Architecture

I help people deploy more value with less code.

Mike Thornton

Marc van Neerven

Independent Software Business Consultant

Fractional CTO 💡 Top Startups Voice⚡ Helping startups make better SaaS

You’ve got vision.

I help you turn it into something that actually ships, scalable, beautiful, and built to last.

As a Fractional CTO, I help founders and leadership teams:

Turn strategy into execution: translating boardroom vision into working code and real traction.

Build lean, high-performing tech teams: in-house, remote, or hybrid, with just the right balance of structure and speed.

Adopt AI the right way: embedding an AI mindset into products, workflows, and decision-making before it’s too late.

Create SaaS that sells itself: through a Product-Led Growth approach that puts value before friction.

Design for humans, build for scale: applying design thinking, solid architecture, and open-web standards to grow sustainably.

My work is transformational: when I leave, your company keeps moving faster, smarter, and with more clarity than before.

I’m not a slide-deck strategist. I still code, design, and build proof-of-concepts myself, focusing (and advocating for) the Open Web, and native cloud to prove what’s possible.

You want your SaaS to grow leaner, smarter, and more human.
Let’s build it.

Startup Expert

Writing blogs about the life of a CTO at Startups and Scaleups. 

Has the world gone mad? 🤯

I just read Paul Hebert's deep dive on the Shadcn radio button ¹.

It’s thoughtful. Detailed. Carefully engineered.

And it perfectly illustrates the problem.

We are writing React components, layering abstractions, wiring state machines, and debating micro-patterns…
…to recreate something the browser does natively (and very well).

What a radio button should be:

<input type="radio" name="beverage" value="coffee" />

That’s it.

Accessible. Keyboard-navigable. Screen-reader compatible. Form-compatible. Zero JS required.

And yet the modern stack says:
- Hide the native control
- Rebuild it with divs and spans
- Reimplement focus logic
- Synchronize state with React
- Hope accessibility survives the refactor

All to achieve… styling.

But styling is not a JavaScript concern.

Styling should come from your Design System, or at least from CSS that lives in a shared asset and is cached separately.

And styling radio buttons has long been extremely easy with pure CSS.

The deeper issue isn’t Shadcn however.
It’s that we’ve normalized rebuilding HTML in JavaScript.

When your design system requires a component layer to render a radio button, something fundamental shifted.

Not everything that looks modern is progress.

Sometimes the most radical move in 2026 is to trust the platform again.

The browser ships a radio button.
Maybe we should start there.

Article in the comments.

¹ Shadcn components have become a sort of automatic goto for LLM agents - together with React and Tailwind 😔...

#puredesignsystem #webstandards #shadcn

Fractional CTO 🚀 AI Mind, SaaS Soul, Human Heart

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Mike Thornton

Marc van Neerven

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The Battle

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Marc van Neerven

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Marc van Neerven's LinkedIn Performance

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