Consulting

I have been building software for over sixteen years, from scrappy startups to large enterprises, mostly the kind of work where getting the architecture wrong costs you months rather than days.

One project shaped a lot of how I think about this. I designed and built a logistics platform for one of the largest Amazon FBM sellers in the US, running orders worth over $250M a year. At that scale collecting, processing and exposing data is not a feature you add later, it is the backbone the business stands on.

What I help with

• ✓ Data engineering. Pipelines that survive your actual volume, warehousing your analysts can trust, and reporting that answers business questions instead of just looking busy.
• ✓ Software architecture. Systems that grow with the business rather than holding it back, and modular monoliths when microservices would be an expensive mistake.
• ✓ Observability. OpenTelemetry done properly, so traces, metrics and logs connect. Including cutting an APM bill you are probably overpaying.

How that works in practice

• ✓ Fractional architect. Part-time on your team, reviewing pull requests and weighing in on design decisions, catching the problems that only surface six months later.
• ✓ Coding services. Sometimes you just need the pipeline, warehouse or reporting system built. I have built all of them before.
• ✓ Hands-on workshops. Code-first, in person or remote, built around the problems your team actually has rather than a generic curriculum.
• ✓ Mentoring. One-on-one or small groups, based on what worked and what did not across sixteen years.
• ✓ Data concierge. Sitting between analysts who have questions and engineers who have the data, so nobody files a ticket to get a number.

Why there is no price here

Because there is no standard engagement. A two day workshop and a six month fractional architecture arrangement are not the same thing, and pricing them as though they were would be dishonest to one of us. Every engagement is quoted individually, based on the complexity and size of the problem and how much of it you want me carrying.

The first call is free and costs you half an hour. That is usually enough to work out whether I am the right person for this at all, and if I am not, I will say so.

Words are cheap, here is the code

I maintain Flow PHP, close to fifty packages covering DataFrames, Parquet, a PostgreSQL toolkit with a real query builder and SQL parser, and an OpenTelemetry implementation. It is all open source, and it is a better description of how I think about software than anything I could write on a sales page.