About Me

Why hire me to join your team?

Above all, because I truly care. I really love the craft of programming, and the design challenges in creating software solutions to business problems. This is not "just what I do to pay the rent". Creating software is what I love, it's what I care about, what I strive to do better every day, and that shows in the results.

I consistently deliver great results. I have a long list of successful projects under my belt, including many with very last-minute deadlines, many others that were failing projects that needed to be put back on track. I have always delivered on every one of them.

In over 20 years working professionally, I've never ever had an unhappy client or employer. These are the nice things people have said about me.

I have excellent communication skills, and a big picture, business view of what the software should accomplish for you. When approaching a project, I'll be listening to the problem we're trying to solve, not to a list of features. I'll ask hard questions, really understand the issues, and together we will design an effective solution. In most cases, the solution ends up being better, cheaper and less convoluted than the original request intended.

I really enjoy mentoring and ramping up less experienced team members. This manifests not only in my teamwork, but also in my volunteer work to teach programming to people from diverse or underrepresented backgrounds.

I don't overengineer things. I won't build a huge custom CMS platform that is extensible, with a scripting language and a plugin system. I'll build what we need, so we can launch or start using it as early as possible, and then refine as we see how it actually works and what we need from there. No, it won't scale to 450 million daily users the first month, but you most likely won't need that for a while, and would rather have a cheaper, simpler initial development, when resources are more limited, and the risk is at its highest.

I've always been very passionate about performance, ever since I started writing small games as a kid, trying to extract more frames per second out of VB6 and DirectX. My learnings from this period, plus more recent experiences with databases have been hugely fruitful in my career. Nowadays, I specialize in writing high performance API servers, or improving performance on existing codebases that are straining under their own success.

I'm can work extremely fast when needed, and I'm very realistic and accurate in my estimates. I regularly complete big projects under very tight deadlines, with excellent results.

I understand web security. I'm no security expert, but I have a very clear grasp of the main threats faced by a website, SQL Injection, XSS, CSRF, etc, and keep these threats in mind in everything that I create. To date, no site that I've made has been hacked, broken, or misused in any unexpected way (and they have tried, I regularly get the error emails from the break-in attempts).