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Hire Me

Hire Me

I'm available for hire for up to 20 hours per week.

I'm open to other options but here are three different angles from which you might want my help, each with their own hourly rate.

If these (or adjacent possibilities) are of interest to you, then we should start with a discovery call. This is capped to 1 hour max, and is free of charge. If we decide to work together on that call, we can set the specific terms then.

Option 1: Fractional CTO

I started programming when I was 9 years old. In my early teens, I built a textured raycasting engine in C and x86 Assembler. I have worked as a PHP developer for web agencies and startups, as a Java developer for large consulting companies in finance, and as a Ruby on Rails developer for my own startups and my own companies. All this to say, I have a substantial experience of software development in a variety of contexts.

More recently, I have plunged head-first into AI development - both the use of AI to create software faster, and the leveraging of AI capabilities to build better product features.

I can help you with things a CTO would normally do:

  • training your team to make use of AI to speed up feature development
  • defining the best ways to incorporate bleeding edge AI technology to support your product and/or organisation
  • determining whether your vision can realistically be implemented and how much effort it will be with current, bleeding edge technologies
  • designing a viable tech architecture to do so
  • bootstrapping a product out of nothing
  • hiring a team to continue development
  • advising on improving an existing tech organisation to make it more efficient

I am opinionated, and if you hire me these opinions will be part of my offering:

  • I don't like to waste money or time on unnecessary features or bells and whistles.
  • As an entrepreneur, I like to focus any tech effort on maximising the chances of a company to survive or increase its revenue, rather than building products ungrounded in commercial reality.
  • I can work with any technology stack, but my place of greatest comfort will be web applications, with a focus on Ruby on Rails.

I am available to hire as a fractional CTO for a minimum of 4h/month, for $250/hr.

Option 2: Business & Culture Coach

I have a long history in startups. My first "startup-like" project was in 2001. I have built multiple businesses, some successful and some less so, and have a number of scars to show it.

In my third business, GrantTree, I pioneered a number of innovative culture practices that made it an exceptional place to work, which I have documented in my upcoming book, Founder Freedom.

Having been on the receiving end of much advice about how to run my company, I know how ineffective it can be. And so I will not call myself a "culture advisor". But I can act as a coach to help you solve, in a most human-friendly way than most companies manage, the sorts of questions that growing companies encounter, particularly around the 5 to 50 growth stage:

  • Is there some practical guidance on how to actually build an innovative cultures?
  • Why do you keep getting dragged into work that should happen without you?
  • Why does your hiring process feel like a pile of hacks?
  • Why are people just not giving each other useful feedback?
  • How can you pay people fairly and keep them happy?
  • You don’t trust the hierarchical pyramid, but what else is there?
  • How can you stop conflicts from slowing everything down?
  • Why do people keep pushing back on necessary changes in unexpected ways?
  • Why is firing people such an awful experience that feels so unfair to the person being fired?
  • How are you supposed to find time to grow the business when you’re so busy dealing with all these problems?

If the questions above resonate, get in touch.

My rate for this work will be initially $100/hour, with a minimum of 4 hours a month, but I intend to increase this over time and after the publication of my book.

Option 3: Rails (and other) Developer

I have built, from scratch, more projects than I can remember. I am up to date on the latest Ruby on Rails tools and techniques, and can also work on legacy codebases (particularly if there's a plausible chance of bringing them up to date).

I first started writing BASIC, then Pascal, then C and Assembler, then PHP and Javascript (jQuery initially, then React, Svelte, Hotwire), then Java, then finally Ruby and Rails. My preference is for Ruby on Rails, and that's where I'll be most effective as a developer. That said, I will consider working with other technologies if the project is interesting enough.

Whatever Ruby on Rails project you have, I can probably work on it in a way useful to you. If you don't have one yet, I am comfortable helping you bootstrap it and set up a suitable production environment for it[footnote]On this, I have a preference for higher performance environments like Hetzner servers, rather than PaaS hosting which tends to get very expensive very quickly if your product actually gets used[/footnote].

I make use of both Claude Code and Codex (paid for by myself) to speed up my delivery work, and, in my experience, can deliver features at the speed of a small team, once I am familiar with your codebase (a process which itself is accelerated by using these tools).

If you would like to see a sample of my code, have a look at HelixKit, a Rails+Svelte+Inertia app kit to bootstrap full featured highly interactive applications more quickly.

If you would like to hire me, please get in touch.

My rate for this work is $150/hour.