If you want to know more about me, the services I provide, or my approach to software, check out https://sambleckley.com, or reach out to sam@sambleckley.com
If you want to know more about me, the services I provide, or my approach to software, check out https://sambleckley.com, or reach out to sam@sambleckley.com
SEEKING WORK | United States / Michigan | Remote | Full Stack Software Engineer and Designer
I'm a software engineer and designer with 2 decades of experience across a wide range of industries, from B2B factory-floor logistics to language design to cute consumer web apps. I specialize in helping small teams solve tricky technical and process problems, quickly. Is your team not delivering as fast as you expect? Are you dealing with more bugs or more setbacks than you think you should? Is there some tricky architectural or design problem you can't crack on your own? I can help push your codebase and your team to improve, so that you'll be running on greased rails even after our contract is done.
For people using text search, here are some of the technologies I'm comfortable using:
SEEKING WORK | United States / Michigan | Remote | Full Stack Software Engineer and Designer
I'm a software engineer and designer with 2 decades of experience across a wide range of industries, from B2B factory-floor logistics to language design to cute consumer web apps. I specialize in helping small teams solve tricky technical and process problems. Is your team not delivering as fast as you expect? Are you dealing with more bugs or more setbacks than you think you should? Is there some tricky architectural or design problem you can't crack on your own? I can help push your codebase and your team improve, so that you'll be running on greased rails even after our contract is done.
Here are some of the technologies I'm comfortable working with:
I absolutely agree that an arbitrary line can be drawn; I don't see that that line can be clear and bright enough that forms the kind of precedence that can be relied upon by folks who don't have the money to fight an uncertain battle in court.
Can you give an example of a “clear and bright” line in copyright law that does protect “folks who don’t have the money to fight an uncertain battle in court”?
For context, I’m in the process of translating a work that I know for a fact is in the public domain (sole author died 90+ years ago) and I’ve still got legal questions that I’m going to have to hire a lawyer to solve.
You don't need focus; you need to understand what your goal is. If you're dropping projects that look "unfinished" because, in reality, you've gotten what you want from them, that is fine. It only looks sloppy from the outside.
If you're dropping projects before you get what you want from them, introspect on why. What's happening that leads you away? Address that.
I recommend reading Barbara Sher's "Refuse to Choose"; it provides some useful tools for people who like to do 70 different things, including how to have lots of ideas without having to act on every one immediately.
I'm usually a terrible speaker, but when I was running a startup I really believed in, I made great presentations and was very extroverted. Find a purpose and the rest takes care of itself.
That is also valuable, but a different premise! Barbara Sher originally wrote books based on that premise: find Your Thing and you'll shine -- but discovered that some people didn't seem to have A Thing, and any talk of having A Thing made them stressed and unhappy.
The Barbara Sher book for people who want to find and follow Their Purpose is "I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was".
"Refuse to Choose" is for people who want to do 70 things but the thought of doing any one of them exclusively is horrifying.
Thanks for sharing this. I'm the type of person that likes to do 70 different things and didn't think to look for resources that might better support that way of living. I discovered way too late that I had anxiety. Almost everyone along the way suggested, or forced, some form of focus or refinement, which always ended up making me feel sad.
GP uplifted my perspective on my projects' progress as well.
I have anxiety, adhd, go to aa, am exhibit a, etc.
It's a tiger to ride but I wouldn't have it any other way!
I'm going to dig back in tonight with a fresher outlook, will look at that Sher book too.
This appears to be based on a strange assumption that developers' estimates can't take historical work into account, but dev managers' can; and that estimates coming from dev managers and based on historical work will not be questioned for being too high even in orgs where the devs' estimates will.
I'm not sure the prescription given fits the disease described; it feels more like passing the problem on to a different role than actually changing the approach.
Lots and lots of best practice exists specifically to help teams, and especially teams with some normal amount of turnover.
The problems of a solo dev are very different than a dev on a team. Knowledge silos don't exist. Distributed expertise doesn't exist. There's no one to mentor, no shared vision to maintain, no intertia to combat.
I consult on big complicated team projects. I also manage multiple solo projects.
On solo projects, deployment is a script I run from my dev machine. I'm the only person who deploys; anything else would be solving a problem I don't have.
The only "CI" is running the tests before I run the deployment script. I'm the only one who needs to see the outcome of the tests. Anything more would be solving a problem I don't have.
Architecture is whatever makes the most sense to me personally -- which is often miles away from what I would recommend to a client, who needs something any new hire will recognize and be able to work with.
I pay a service to manage backups so I can walk away from a solo project for months and know it's ticking away.
The point is: solve problems you actually have. Don't try to run a "professional" operation by doing what big teams do all by yourself. Big teams have different problems.
'knowledge silos' in a one person team are real: Me today and me from 2 years ago when I set a thing up are different people, and I don't remember that any more than a team mate in a multi-person team would know it. This is where 'professional' approaches can help considerably: using 'standardized' stuff, instead of bespoking everything (even if bespoking is much easier), or making sure you write a TON of documentation for anything you don't do daily...
I'm a fan of the documenting everything even on stuff I wrote and maintain for myself. Because, like you said, old me was way smarter than current me. When he was writing this code, he had the domain space modeled in his head better than me now, 2 years later trying to fix/maintain something.
Probably the best tool you have is somewhere to write your notes down. What you did, why you did it, how to reproduce it. That saves you time in a year or two when you go 'hmm I did something like this before have to do it again because some CPU ate itself'. My old notes have saved me a lot of re-work over the years. Because I had written down what I did so I do not have to rebuild it. I can just skip along the notes and be most of the way there.
This bit seems to hold true across any size team for me. If I have notes I can spiffy them up and make cheat sheets out of them and bootstrap other developers faster. Or if it is just me, my feeble brain will forget odd details that I needed for something.
Absolutely, extensive notes are a huge part of my practice both on teams and solo [1] -- I'm trying to say "solve the problems you actually have" not "when solo, cowboy-code everything like a madman".
Pretty much anyone you can pay to host a database, you can pay to back it up. Amazon rds, heroku postgres, google cloud sql... pick the service that works for you, and they have some affordance for backups. Backups are something I expect, rather than something I shop around for.
In my case I'm dumping + zipping the entire database at the application level. In my case is as simple as adding a library [1], scheduling the job and transferring to AWS S3 (my main application is on DigitalOcean)
I'm Sam Bleckley, a full stack engineer with 2 decades of successful outcomes consulting across dozens of industries. I can help with:
- Technical challenges ("We know the feature we want, but we don't have the expertise or the time to get it built")
- Process challenges ("We keep missing deadlines," "We're deploying too many bugs," or "The team has no motivation")
- Product design challenges ("We believe this solves our users' problems, but they aren't using it they way we expect")
I also offer fixed-bid development of small prototypes and MVPs, if you need to prove an idea, or have a new project hit the ground running.
If you're looking for experience in a specific tech stack, here are some of the technologies I'm comfortable using:
```AngularJS, Angular, AWS (S3, Lambda, RDS, &c.), C, CSS, Creative Cloud, Flask, git, Glamor, GCS, HTML, Javascript/ECMAscript, Lisps of many varieties, Next.js, Node, Photoshop, Python, Ruby on Rails, React, Ruby, SASS, SCSS, Svelte, Swift, Typescript, Vue, whatever legacy DSL you've got ```
If you want to know more about me, the services I provide, or my approach to software, check out https://sambleckley.com, or reach out to sam@sambleckley.com