FAQs

Fit and scope

If your team has the bandwidth and expertise, you should go for it.
If you’ve got the expertise but not the bandwidth, you may have been putting off a review until “later”. But for many companies, “later” never becomes “now.” You can wait and see if you get there, or get in touch.
If you’ve got the bandwidth but not enough expertise—or neither—get in touch.
I can work with companies of any size, but I find the sweet spot is companies or independent teams with 10-200 employees.
Of course. I can help get you off the ground and in the right direction early—which could save you a lot of headache, wheel-spinning, wasted development time, and wasted seed money.
You don’t need to know what’s wrong. It’s exactly my job to figure it out.
That’s where my main focus is at present, but I’ve got a wide range of experience across frameworks and languages. Get in touch and I can give you an honest assessment of how I can help.

I make every effort to learn as much as I can about the business, it’s infrastructure and the codebase in the discovery phase (2-3 days) so that much of my work thereafter can be independent. That being said, I also request an engineering contact who can help answer followup questions as I come across them.
Typically, remote is sufficient, and I’m a 25-year veteran of remote work. But in certain cases I understand it makes sense to physically visit a site.
This is always a possibility. I do try to get a sense of expectations early in the project, and I’ll warn you if it seems like there’s a significant divergence.

I encourage any client to follow the security best-practice of least privilege, so I start with read-only access to the codebase and infrastructure, though testing and profiling may require additional permissions.
I keep all code and data on a single machine, locally, and data is encrypted in backups.

My Github account and other sensitive accounts are protected by physical security key. When a client gives me access to resources via a company SSO platform, I secure it the same way.
Of course.
I won’t work with two directly competing products, platforms or services. We can discuss this in our initial consultation.
Yes—I carry a full E&O policy through The Hartford.
I delete all code and data at the end of the project unless you request I keep it for future reference. You should of course remove any access granted on your end too.

I typically work with both. Working with leadership or their representatives is essential to understanding the business, but working with engineers is essential to understanding the existing details.
The project involves discovery, investigation and recommendations, which can be handed off to your team for implementation, or implemented by me. I recommend some team involvement in the implementation so they’re not in the dark about what the changes are and how they work.

While I don’t offer on-call support plans, I’m happy to schedule regular check-ins to review your progress, questions, or assist with implementation.
I can help in the hiring process in two ways: a) helping build or review the position’s skills requirements, and 2) reviewing a shortlist of candidates for the role.