I direct projects for a living.
For three decades, in three industries. The toolchain keeps changing. The job — figure out what to build, get the right people moving, ship on time — doesn’t.
I’m a solo developer based in Southern California. I build custom software for businesses that have outgrown what off-the-shelf SaaS can offer them — usually because their workflow has a wedge in it that the SaaS can’t accommodate, or because three subscriptions are doing the work of one application that doesn’t exist yet.
Before software, I spent thirty years directing specialists on complex projects. The work was always the same shape: figure out what the client actually needs (which is rarely what they say they need), get a small team of experts moving in the same direction, ship on a deadline that doesn’t move. Different industries; same job.
Animators, exhibit designers, video editors, courtroom techs. Three to six weeks to turn millions of pages of evidence into something a jury can hold in their hands. The deadline was the trial date and it never moved. This is where I learned the job.
One significant project — a residential build at industrial scale: PLCs, sensor networks, SCADA. The job was choreographing electrical, mechanical, and software people who didn’t naturally agree about what “done” meant. Same role I’d been doing — new toolchain, harder physics. It taught me what software people miss about hardware deadlines.
Same role again. This time the specialists are software — a few well-chosen ones with a deliberate plan, and me. I write the architecture, they write a lot of the code, and I do the parts that need a person — deciding what to build, where to draw the line, how it should feel to use.
The thing all three jobs taught me: the writing is the work. The SCOPE document, the trial outline, the controls narrative — whatever you call it — is where the project actually gets built. Code is a transcription. So is wiring. So is animation. The hard part is upstream of all of it, in the document that says what you’re going to do.
That’s why I work fixed-price. If I’ve written the SCOPE well, the build is mostly carpentry, and the time it takes is predictable. If I’ve written the SCOPE badly, that’s on me — and I’d rather find out in week 1, in the document, than in week 5, in your inbox.
Who I work with
Trades businesses, professional services firms, small operations groups inside larger companies. People who have been pricing SaaS subscriptions and quietly suspecting that what they actually need is a thing that doesn’t exist yet. Engagements run four to six weeks and replace something specific — not “our entire stack,” but a definable sliver of it where custom is clearly the right answer.
I don’t take projects where the brief is “build us an app” without an opinion attached. The opinion is the project. If you don’t have one yet, that’s fine — the SCOPE phase is where we develop it. But we develop it before any code is written.
If your shape fits, write to me.
A few sentences about the wedge in your workflow, what you’ve tried, and what done would look like.
Get in touch →