Consult

I have a wealth of experience designing and building web-based platforms and products. I can offer tangible value across the spectrum, from product strategy and user interaction down to every detail of implementation.

I am currently accepting clients.

My values

Truth

My approach is anchored in truth: both discerning it and telling it.

Art

Creating software is an artistic activity.

ART, n. “The disposition or modification of things by human skill, to answer the purpose intended. In this sense art stands opposed to nature.”

Forgive me a fake quote:

“I know how I want the score to sound, now someone just has to write the notes” - Certainly Not Hans Zimmer.

The real work of composition, of course, is in finding the notes that convey the intended feelings. The final score must follow the laws and constraints of music while also ‘answering the purpose intended’. Art is the reification of an idea into a particular medium, whether it’s a score, paint, prose, or code.

Because ’the programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff’ (Brooks, 1975) there is an incredible amount of discretion to apply when searching the space of possible designs. It is in this phase that our ideas and desires encounter the constraints of our medium; this is why so many interesting and high-leverage decisions do not occur until programming begins.

If it’s an art, then, it follows that study, practice, experience, and taste are the ingredients for quality

Simplicity

first principles over popularity

Ex falso, quodlibet

Good design does not solve problems so much as it dis-solves them. The deletion of problems has immeasurable value, but, unfortunately as Dijkstra observed, “complexity sells better”, and the virtues of simplicity are typically ingrained through suffering.

Services

Software development

I build software of the highest quality across many domains and stacks

Codebase and system assessment

I can introduce practices that solve more problems than they create, and help to eliminate practices that create more problems than they solve.

Database health

I understand database internals and have leveraged this expertise to operate at zero database downtime or degradation for years at a time

AI guidance

Let’s use LLMs where they excel, with skill, taste, and respect

I’ve hand-written systems that pushed billions of tokens through inference, from 4k-context gpt-3.5 completions to today’s frontier models. I know where LLMs excel and where they’re a liability, and, grounded in a mastery of software engineering without AI, I help software engineers adopt them without compromising their skills, their work, or their ability to maintain their software.

Mentorship and coaching

I’m an established software engineering mentor. My passion for programming is contagious, and I have a keen sense for the mental models and thought processes that lead to bugs and poor designs and how to revise them. I can codify and give names to concepts in the art of programming that are typically only felt and never clearly verbalized.

Fractional CTO

As an engineering leader in SaaS for over a decade, I have been there. Staffing, technology choices, vendor selection, buy-vs-build, cost management, team development, ops, SDLC.

System design

Complexity-averse to my bones.

I spent formative years operating on a microservice monstrosity, and learned a lot about the cost and the origins of incidental complexity.

I’m not here to sell branded, trendy solutions to imaginary problems of scale, but to eradicate unnecessary complexity and achieve simpler, healthier systems.