Chicagoland, United States
An engineer who cares what it looks like.
Close to twenty years in technology. The last nine building full-stack software for large American companies, including a Fortune 5. Based in Illinois, working across Chicagoland - and anywhere else with a browser.
Good Looking Digital
Who you are hiring
Most of that time has been on enterprise applications used by thousands of people, at a Fortune 5 company and other large American names. Front end in React and Angular, back end in Java and Spring Boot or Node, SQL and MongoDB behind it, AWS and Google Cloud underneath, and testing at every level from unit to end-to-end.
The range is deliberate. Working across all of it means a project is not passed between three companies before it is finished. It also means the person you speak to on the first call is the person writing the code, and the person who answers when something breaks two years later. Agencies tend to put a salesperson in front and someone junior behind.
The part I keep coming back to is the front end, and the person on the other side of it. Plenty of people can make something look good, and plenty can make something work. Doing both on the same project, with no handoff in the middle, is what the name means.
Not typical for a solo shop
- Enterprise applications used by thousands, internal and customer-facing
- User interviews and user-experience research, run first-hand
- Years working alongside dedicated UI/UX teams
- Senior business stakeholder management
- Full ownership from database schema to the last pixel
- Automated testing at unit, integration and end-to-end level
The one I am most pleased with
We took a team out of spreadsheets
A group of business analysts spent their days entering large volumes of data into shared spreadsheets. Worse than the typing was the waiting - a file checked out by one person was locked to everyone else, so work queued up behind whoever had it open.
The team I was on built them a real application instead: an interface they could actually navigate, a backend and database behind it, and validation that caught mistakes as they typed rather than a week later. Their data entry time dropped substantially and the bottleneck disappeared.
The thanks kept arriving for months afterwards. Not for the architecture - for giving them their afternoons back. That was at a Fortune 5 company, and it is still the work I am most pleased with.
1
Person who answers when you call. Always the same one
20 yrs
In technology - the last nine building software, including for a Fortune 5 company
100%
Of the steps that make you money, tested automatically
< 1s
Target load time on every page we build
How the work runs
Four things you can hold us to
Say the number early
Price bands are on the site. If a project is not a fit for the budget, that conversation happens on the first call rather than after three meetings.
Build the proof, then make the claim
Every capability on this site is one the work can back. When something is not offered yet, it says so plainly rather than being quietly implied.
Test what ships
The flows that lose you money get automated tests, so a broken form is caught by a machine rather than reported by a customer who gave up.
You own everything
The site, the domain, the content, the Google and Facebook pages. Access is delegated, never held hostage. Leaving should be easy, which is why it is.
What this is not
The limits, said out loud
Every agency site lists what it does. Fewer list what they will turn down, which is the more useful half if you are trying to work out whether to call.
- Advertising spend is not managed here - pages and profiles are set up, but campaigns are not run
- Desktop and robotic process automation of legacy software is out of scope
- This runs alongside a full-time job, so timelines are honest rather than optimistic
- Work that would be better served by a large agency gets said out loud
Based in Illinois. Working wherever there is a browser.
Local enough to meet you. Remote enough that it has never mattered.