How I work

Focused engagements on operations and automation.

Every engagement starts with a conversation about what is actually broken — not the tool you think will fix it. Below is how I scope, what I ship, and what I decline.

How I engage

  • Tier 01

    Audit & Roadmap

    A fixed-scope review of an existing automation stack or a new opportunity. You receive a written recommendation with build options, estimated effort, and honest trade-offs — whether we continue working together or not.

  • Tier 02

    Build Sprint

    A focused four- to eight-week engagement to design and ship a production-grade automation or AI system end-to-end. Includes architecture, build, testing, observability, and handoff documentation.

  • Tier 03

    Retainer

    Ongoing engineering capacity for teams operating a growing automation surface — maintenance, incident response, and new capability work against a monthly retainer with explicit priorities.

How a project actually runs

The first session is a short conversation — usually 30 to 45 minutes. I come prepared with questions about the system, the team that will inherit it, and the cost of the current manual work. You leave with a written scope whether we continue or not.

If we move forward, the second stage is a short design document: a diagram of the proposed system, the integration contracts, the failure modes, and the specific automation or AI decisions that need signoff before implementation. I would rather disagree on paper than in code.

Implementation runs in narrow slices — usually end-to-end feature by feature, so each week produces something that can be demonstrated and tested against real data. Observability, retries, and idempotency are not end-of-project polish; they ship with each slice.

Handoff is a deliverable, not an afterthought. Every engagement ends with a runbook for the team that inherits the system — how it is deployed, how to diagnose the five most likely failures, and what would need to change if the business requirement shifted.

What I don't do

Seniority is partly about knowing which work to decline. I do not take on pure WordPress builds, pure graphic-design work, or projects where the scope is not yet defined — in the last case I will offer a short audit to help you scope it first.

I also do not chase the tool-of-the-week for its own sake. If an existing Zapier workflow is the right answer for your problem, I will tell you so and point you at the template.