Freelance Software Developer, UK

How the work gets delivered

Moving fast now turns into cost later unless a few things are done properly from the start. These are the ones that pay for themselves immediately, so they aren't negotiable on my projects:

• One person accountable for the whole thing. You get progress and decisions rather than a team to coordinate, and there is nobody for a problem to be handed off to.
• Releasing from the first week. Getting a change in front of users stays routine instead of becoming an event you have to plan around.
• Tests that cover how the system really behaves, so a change late in the project doesn't quietly break what already worked. I've released open source tooling to make that kind of testing practical.
• Infrastructure defined as code, so your cloud setup can be rebuilt or handed to someone else, and isn't something only I understand.

None of it is ceremony. Each one makes the next change cheaper, which is the only thing that matters while you're still finding out what your product should be.

Where I've delivered

Delivery across fintech, energy, medtech, e-commerce and early stage products. The most recent work:

• Fanalysis — Staff Software Engineer, on back-end, platform and infrastructure engineering for a new product, using serverless AWS, TypeScript and CDK.
• HOA Mailers — contract engineer across cloud infrastructure, back end and front end, in Go, TypeScript, Next.js and PostgreSQL.
• Doozy — two contracts on back-end, platform and front-end engineering, including the engineering work for SOC 2 compliance.
• Octopus Energy and Bulb Energy — contract engineer on back-end and platform work, serverless and microservice systems in Python on AWS and GCP.
• Freetrade — Principal Software Engineer, among the first five engineers at the company. I built their subscription payment system and their stock market FIX trading integration, and a testing framework that made their CI pipelines faster and more accurate.

Earlier work includes back-end engineering at uMed in medtech and four years on e-commerce and social platforms at LoveCrafts. There is more on all of it on the blog.

What colleagues have said

You've probably been the most responsive engineer I've worked with and you always reply straight away with very helpful responses… you were so quick to implement the things I needed.

It is intuitive, beautifully separated, easy to expand and in general, it is just a pleasure to look at the code.