Hire Me

I make software and I make software that helps make software. I mainly do this as a contractor or a consultant, but I'm open to a full-time role if your team is a really good fit.

If you've ever thought:

"Man, I just wish I could find another Pivot for this project."

or

"I wish we had better CI/Terraform/DevOps on this project, but I don't think we're ready to hire a full time DevOps person yet."

then we should probably talk. Even if we can't work together right now, careers are long, and I like talking shop. Send me an e-mail at nat@simplermachines.com, or schedule a meeting with my Calendly.

Some kinds of work I do:

Web application development. I can operate across most parts of the "stack" these days, from writing and styling frontend components, to choosing between relational and key-value storage. I am probably most useful to a team that pairs and write tests and needs another experienced person, but I can happily work solo or asynchronously. Lately, I've been working primarily with Elixir and Phoenix, and I've also written production code in Ruby, Go, Typescript, Java, and React.

Pipelines, platforms, CI/CD, and containers. Whether you call it Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, Platform Engineering, or just "infra," I can do all the other parts of shipping an app besides just writing a code – and I'll do it with you, so you won't have a big complicated mess to maintain after I leave.

Advice about platforms and shipping. Are teams you're responsible having a hard time shipping, and you're trying to figure out why? Have you invested in building an application platform, but you can't get your developers to actually use it? With experience in both application and platform development I'm unusually good at diagnosing problems in this area. I can help you figure out what's going on with your application teams, and what should be on your infrastructure team's roadmap to make them as productive as possible.

Observability. Are you pretty sure you need more than your existing logs and monitoring, but you're not quite sure what? Maybe you're considering tracing or error tracking, but you're wary of how much work it might be to integrate a new tool, and you don't want to end up with an expensive mess. Maybe you want to get out of managing an ELK stack and a Prometheus, but you're worried about how much a vendor will cost, and you keep putting off the migration. I can help you make sense of your options, train folks to get the most out of these tools, and maybe even do some of the implementation work.