Consulting

If your Postgres is slow, your observability bill has gotten out of hand, or you need something to run reliably on constrained hardware, I can probably help. Here's what I like doing and how it works.

I've spent about fifteen years building web applications, data pipelines, and the infrastructure that watches them. Most of the work comes back to the same idea: if you get the data structures right, everything after that gets easier. Rob Pike put it better than I can: "if you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident." That's how I think about all of this, whether it's a Postgres schema, a pile of telemetry, or a Rails app.

Here are the things I'm usually a good fit for.

PostgreSQL and PostGIS

Slow queries, schemas that have drifted into a mess, and spatial data nobody on the team is comfortable with. I like this work. One customer had spent seven figures over several months with another vendor trying to get a complex spatial analysis of their network serviceability data with their fiber, copper, and wireless plant. They never finished it. I delivered the whole thing in a week, at a fraction of the cost. PostGIS in particular is one of those things people either know or completely avoid, and I've done enough of it to be useful.

OpenTelemetry and ClickHouse

A lot of teams are trying to get off Elastic or Datadog right now, usually because the bill got out of hand or the queries got too slow. I help with that move: standing up OpenTelemetry, getting logs, metrics, and traces into ClickHouse, and sorting out retention so it actually holds up at volume.

Systems and network programming

Services that run close to the metal, on specialized machines and network gear. I've written network measurement services in Rust that run on routers and dedicated hardware. You're working against tight resources and you can't be sloppy. If you've got something that has to run reliably on a constrained device or sit down in the network stack, this is the sort of work I like.

I also do plenty of ordinary application work: Ruby on Rails for the web side, Python for scripting and data work, and I'm comfortable picking up whatever a problem actually needs. The languages matter less than getting the shape of the thing right.

How I work

I like fixed scope. We agree on what the deliverable is and what it costs before I start, so there aren't surprises on either side. For a bigger job I'll usually start with a short paid assessment, because it's hard to quote something well before I've looked at the real thing. If you need ongoing help, a monthly retainer is easier for both of us.

I'm based in northwest Georgia and work remotely. If any of this sounds like what you need, email me at [email protected] and tell me what's going on. That's the fastest way to reach me.