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. I still use SSH and Vim. A lot.
6 sites
on one IP, each broken into separately
Same Server, Same Plugin
An attacker went after every site on one server’s IP address and got into all six the same way, through one outdated plugin. There was no sign that one site had been used to reach another. I found the backdoor’s signature, cleaned and checked every file, reinstalled core files, updated plugins, removed three admin accounts the attacker had created, rotated credentials and turned on auto-updates. Each site now also runs as its own Linux user, so one compromised site can’t reach the others in the future.
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. One custom SQL query brought it to under 32 MB and 2 seconds.
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 in Visual Basic on purpose, so the engineers could maintain it themselves. The same thinking in Perl took WHM customer onboarding from 2 hours to 2 minutes.
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. I once moved a whole server room overnight, re-cabling the racks, with zero business disruption.
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
4 design firms
on 3 continents
A Pretty Big Town
I’ve built the custom features 4 web design firms needed, after working through each problem with their UX designers. I’ve worked with companies in California, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, France, England and Australia.The Latest
- Large Recording Uploads to Amazon S3 (10 Dec 2024)
- DMARC Help: Email Trust Monitoring (01 Dec 2017)
- The End of http.sh (15 Nov 2016)
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.