Web Development and Programming

I do the majority of my work for small to mid-size technology and media clients who are looking for ways to do business more effectively. There are perhaps five major reasons why my clients return to me time and again to help them plot a course through their next phase of development.

• Thoroughness
  Often my clients have a team of programmers on hand who can in theory create anything under the sun. The challenge is that in order to do so, they usually need someone else to look over the project and break it up into discreet subprojects and monitor the progress of each of these subprojects in order to bring anything to fruition. This works for the most part but it is often a slow and resource intensive process. Clients yrust me to hear the problem, craft a solution with the fewest dependencies possible, and to coordinate the completion of all of the required steps along the way.
• Reliability
  Whether working on-site or remotely, I stay in touch with my clients. I let them know if there are opportunities to increase the quality and relevance of data aquisition, architectural decisions that should not be made without business considerations, or obstacles to effective progress.
• Actionability
  I want the things I create to be useful. Often my clients have ideas on how they would like to interact with their customers, or how they would like to evolve their businesses. These ideas are often based on boardroom hunches. Often everyone can see that their is an opportunity for growth available, but their is usually a question of whether this growth opportunity is valuable enough to warrant detracting from the focus of the organization. In such situations my clients often find my ability to look at the opportunity and design a working prototype that can be used to evaluate the opportunity at hand, understand the logistical challenges to expansion, and form the basis for subsequent development in this area. The goal of each of my prototypes is to give the stakeholder the facts and details they need to make a case for the proposed venture.
• Forethought
  In my experience many programmers create exactly what you ask them to. Often that is helpful, but often what you request is limited by a model in preconception state. While in the process of creating an application many choices have to be made to limit or keep an architecture open to other possibilities. I try to build structures that are simple enough to be refactored and reused beyond their original purpose, and to always program with an eye towards where the company will want to expand next. This involves a lot of thinking ahead and noting what possibilites lie just outside of the requirement.
• Self-Containment
  I am able to build small self-contained testbeds for ideas. Of course I understand the value of scalability in web architecture, however I find that I can often add a lot of value to a situation by building a very small prototype of the issues and ideas at hand. Looking at things on this smaller scale allows us o see what challenges are going to be involved in scaling an idea larger and what key principles and ramifications should also be on the table. Many times I see a good idea that gets built out (usually improperly) to the Nth degree before it is even determined if the idea is viable or not. A small self-contained prototype can be the difference between being first to market with an idea, and having a great idea which winds up taking a ton of time resources but still never makes it to market.