About

I’m Beda Schmid, and TukuToi LLC is my company. I’m Swiss, I live in Argentina, and I work for businesses in Europe and the US.

From boats to code

I was born in Switzerland in 1982, grew up on a farm, and went to school in Italy until I was sixteen. Back in Switzerland I did a four-year apprenticeship as a wooden boat builder and stayed in the trade for three more years. After that I worked in construction, from helper to leading a team of bricklayers.

Computers came in through the side door. The first one arrived when I was thirteen, thrown out by an office; on a farm it might as well have come from space. I took it apart and put it back together more often than I used it. My own came at twenty-four, online through the neighbors’ phone line. Then the first websites: I made my first gradient heading by repeating a yellow strip, one pixel wide, three hundred times. Then PHP, and then a WordPress blog once I started traveling.

Around thirty I’d had enough of construction. In 2012 I walked the Way of St. James to Santiago de Compostela, six months in one go, took a ship to Miami, drove down to Mexico, and worked my way south through hostels until I reached Argentina.

Learning on the job

In 2014 OnTheGoSystems, the company behind WPML and Toolset, hired me into support. I had only just started with WordPress professionally, so I learned on the job, and fast. I worked my way up to second-level support and the debug team: years of reading other people’s code and finding out why it broke. OnTheGoSystems also paid for my Six Sigma training, which I finished as a Black Belt.

On my own

When Covid hit in 2020, I left to work for myself. A year later I founded TukuToi, first as a company in Vietnam, and since 2024 as TukuToi LLC in the US.

The name is Maori: tukutuku, the web, and toi, art and craft. Web craft, with a nod to the English “toy”. The first TukuToi website was artsy enough to earn it.

What I build now

For clients: mostly PHP, WordPress and WooCommerce, and ASP.NET/C# where it fits (SolaceFusion). For myself: Python tools (TimeEdition summaries), native macOS apps under a separate brand, and experiments with AI agents. One of them is a virtual island where a group of agents believe they are stranded.

Where I am

Travel took me on to Hong Kong, where I met my wife. We got stuck in Vietnam during Covid and stayed almost four years, then sailed from Barcelona to Buenos Aires. We live in Argentina now with our two kids. My working day overlaps with both Europe and the US.

Working with me

The process, the build modes and a real audit report are on How I work. In short:

• One developer, one point of contact. You talk to the person who writes and answers for the code.
• Honest about fit. If a project is not something I do well, I tell you up front and help you find a better option. I ask the same honesty back: clear requirements are where good projects start.
• Scope first. Every project starts with a written scope. I keep measuring against it, so changes are visible and agreed rather than creeping in.
• Standards, checked by tools. WordPress work follows the WordPress Coding Standards, checked with PHP_CodeSniffer. Code quality is also checked with static analysis (SonarQube, on my own server, sonar.tukutoi.com) before release.
• Small and efficient. Lean code and light pages load faster and use less energy on the server and the visitor’s device.
• You choose how it is built. Hand-written or AI-assisted. The build policy says exactly what each means.

Six Sigma

I’m a certified Six Sigma Black Belt. Six Sigma is the quality method behind the scope-first approach above: define the scope, measure, analyze, improve, control. Verify the certificate.

Open source

Most of the plugins and tools I have written are open source and on GitHub. See Software.

For ClassicPress I built the documentation hub, docs.classicpress.net, with contributions from members of the ClassicPress community, and contributed it for free. It still runs on that code. I also submitted code to ClassicPress core, wrote plugins made for ClassicPress, and for a time reviewed plugins submitted to the ClassicPress Directory.

Languages

I work in English, and also speak Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Swiss German and Italian.