200+ holes
closed on a site under attack
What Does the Nerd See?
The computers. If you love an idea but don’t know whether it can be done, that is where I come in.
I’ve gathered requirements from everyone from the CEO of a hospital network to the people who use the software every day, and turned what they needed into software that works. I explain things in plain English, too.
My AI either writes the code or checks it, never both.
Not everything is about clickable interfaces. I also maintain servers and cloud services, and I’d rather build them from files than from clicks: CloudFormation, Docker and Bash scripts. I’ve security-tested Terraform configurations, too. And I still use SSH and Vim. A lot.
1 TB+
of recordings in 25+ languages
Big Files, Slow Connections
Teams around the world needed to send in recordings of up to 10 GB, and many of them don’t speak English as a first language. I built a one-page app that sends each file straight from the browser to Amazon S3. If a piece fails on a weak connection, only that piece retries. It took in over 1 TB in its first two years, and the only maintenance it has needed came with the first file over 5 GB. More about the uploader
2 min → 2 sec
for one product lookup
Finding the Slow Part
A store’s product lookup used 128 MB of memory and 2 minutes of CPU time when searching through 2200+ products. One custom SQL query brought it to under 32 MB and 2 seconds. On one customer’s disk images, my changes cut network transfers from 20 minutes with gzip to 7 minutes, 15 seconds. More about streaming disk images
4 hours → 5 min
of engineering calculations
Software People Can Keep
Calculations that took engineers 4 hours by hand now take under 5 minutes. I wrote it from scratch in Visual Basic on purpose, so the engineers could maintain it themselves. 3 years later, they were still using it to discuss designs with an engineer in Egypt.
12+ languages
written, not spoken
Multilingual
I’ve written production code in more than 12 programming languages, including PHP, Java, Ruby, C and Python. That’s before anyone argues about whether HTML, CSS and XSLT count. Some of the websites I’ve built speak more than one language too: on Xtreme Clutch’s site, readers could switch languages on any page, and the sitemap listed every language so search engines could find each one.
100+ domains
across 10 servers for 5 clients
Keeping the Lights On
I look after my clients’ servers, whether they sit in the client’s own server room or with a cloud provider: DNS, mail servers with SPF and DKIM, networking, firewalls, and PCI DSS compliance. With Perl, I took WHM customer onboarding from 2 hours to 2 minutes. When one customer’s email campaign failed, I built DMARC Help, and its reports found the cause. I once moved a whole server room overnight, re-cabling the racks, with zero business disruption. When Discover France was sold, I moved its website, email and domains to the new owners with no downtime.
15 gyms
on one multi-tenant platform
The Box Tracker
I co-founded a platform that ran 15 CrossFit gyms: daily workouts that went live at midnight in each gym’s own time zone, athlete results, class reservations, coach payroll, a store and recurring billing through 6 payment methods. One codebase served every gym, and its database upgraded itself whenever a new feature shipped. I security-tested it for 2 years with Burp Suite and fuzzing. More about The Box Tracker
8 years
in production, watching 800+ sites
Built to Last
A multithreaded C daemon, backed by MySQL, monitored 800+ websites and stayed in production for about 8 years. More about http.sh
3 coil types
added from undocumented GW-BASIC
Old Code, Put to Work
Great American Coil acquired GW-BASIC calculations with no documentation and plenty of bugs. Turning them into modern code would have meant major rewrites, so I read the code to work out its inputs and outputs, wrapped it in a Visual Basic 6 DLL, tested it against known values, and fixed the most common hangs. AHRI later certified the application for hot and chilled water coils, and I maintained it for years after that. More about Coil Performance
5 design firms
and clients on 3 continents
A Pretty Big Town
I’ve built the custom features 5 web design firms needed, after working through each problem with their UX designers. In Australia, that included a distributor search for a clutch maker. I’ve worked with companies in California, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Missouri, Minnesota, France, England and Australia.The Latest
- Large Recording Uploads to Amazon S3 (10 Dec 2024)
- DMARC Help: Email Trust Monitoring (01 Dec 2017)
- Discover France: Guided Bicycle Tours (16 Jan 2017)
Tell Me About Your Project
Describe what you want to build, and I will get back to you as soon as possible. Use your own words. You don’t need the technical terms.