About Farhan Ihsan
I am Farhan Ihsan, a Senior Consultant at Columbia Road. I work where commercial strategy, frontend engineering, and AI-enabled commerce meet — helping enterprise teams across Finland and the Nordics move from ambition to production with React, Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, Azure AI, and MCP-based agentic workflows.
The story
01 / Trenches
I started in JavaScript and PHP studios where the brief was always “ship it next week, make it last for years.” That early pressure taught me to treat maintainability as a first-class feature, not a nice-to-have.
02 / Scale
At Americana Restaurants I led PWA development for KFC, Hardees, and Pizza Hut across the Middle East — high-traffic ordering where a 200ms regression meant real lost revenue. Built on React, Next.js, performance budgets, and a design system that survived three brand teams.
03 / Consulting
Today at Columbia Road I work the harder version of the same problem: how do you turn commercial strategy into frontends, AI agents, and cloud-native platforms that actually move metrics? By staying close to discovery, architecture, and delivery — not just one of them.
04 / Now
The newest layer is Azure AI services, Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations, and chatbots connected to real catalog, order, and CMS systems. Done well this is not automation theatre — it is a better buying journey and teams who can act with context.
Experience timeline
The companies changed. The stack changed. The discipline of shipping measurable, maintainable software has not.
2025 — Now
Helping enterprise commerce teams turn strategy into shipped growth. Finnish housing and real-estate platforms, HubSpot CMS builds, Azure services, and conversational AI from discovery to production.
Columbia RoadHelsinki
2024 — 2025
Sole full-stack developer on a large-scale education platform. Migrated legacy systems to React and Node.js microservices, cut API latency by 40%, and added WebSocket attendance tracking that removed 90% of manual errors.
ACTVETGovernment of Abu Dhabi
2019 — 2024
Led PWA development for global food brands across MENA, handling 100,000+ orders a month at a 4.8/5 app rating. Led the engineering team, acted as Scrum Lead, and drove a 20% lift in global online revenue.
Americana RestaurantsMENA
2015 — 2019
Agency delivery for B2B and consumer clients across the UAE. Node.js, PHP frameworks, headless CMS, AWS deployments, and conversion-focused frontends.
Zoom Digital, then MR.H DigitalDubai
2013 — 2015
PHP, WordPress, CodeIgniter, jQuery and AJAX for agency clients — where the operational pain taught me to value clean architecture.
Global Business SolutionsDubai
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Capabilities
I work across the whole delivery surface — frontend, backend, cloud, commerce, CMS, and AI — so architecture decisions in one layer do not break the others.
Operating principles
The same four ideas show up whether the brief is a frontend rebuild, an AI chatbot, or a cloud migration. They are how I avoid shipping shelfware.
Decks do not move metrics. Production code, measured experiments, and clear architecture do — so I stay accountable to the number the business actually cares about.
Platforms scale when the next engineer can understand, operate, and safely change them. Naming, boundaries, and tests are commercial decisions, not developer taste.
Agents earn their place by being connected to the business system — catalog, intent, ops, escalation. Anything less is a demo that quietly gets switched off.
Short feedback loops in production beat polished plans that never meet the customer. Ship the thinnest honest slice, then let real behaviour decide what comes next.
Next step
The fastest path is a short scoping call. Bring the constraints, the metric you want to move, and the current pain — I will bring an honest take on the work it will take.
Working from Helsinki on AI consulting in Helsinki, full stack development in Helsinki, and digital commerce consulting in Helsinki.