The person who scopes your build is the person who builds it, puts it live, and answers when it breaks. There is no handoff, because there is nobody to hand off to.

That is the thing agencies sell and rarely deliver. You meet a principal, you sign, and the work goes to whoever is free — often the most junior person who can plausibly do it. Six weeks in, your point of contact is an account manager relaying your questions to somebody you have never met, and the person who understood your business left the project in month two.

Here the whole list is one name. I scope it, I build it, I deploy it, and I am the one who picks up at seven on a Tuesday morning. You are not paying a margin for the layer in between, which is most of the reason this costs what it does.

What twenty-two years buys you

I have been a working engineer since 2003 and have never not been employed doing it. Right now I am a Senior Database Engineer at a regional bank, where I have been since 2017, running systems that have to be up around the clock. Before that: defense, healthcare, oil and gas, and life sciences — including a stretch as interim CIO of an 18-person organisation inside an FDA and HIPAA environment.

That history matters to you for one specific reason. I have spent two decades in places where software failing is not an inconvenience — it is something somebody has to report, in writing, to a regulator. Losing a record there is a career event.

That habit does not switch off because the customer is a plumbing company. It is an unusual background to bring to a quoting tool for a six-truck outfit, and it is exactly why the quoting tool will still have every quote in it in three years.

The catch, stated plainly

One engineer is a real constraint and I would rather say so than have you find out. I take on a small number of builds at a time and finish the ones I start, so there is sometimes a wait to begin.

What you get for that: nobody is juggling your build against four others, nothing is explained twice, and the person who remembers why a decision was made in March is still the one you are talking to in November.

I am not looking for a job and I am not between things. This is work I chose to take on, which is the whole reason the list stays short.

What I work in

Not a wish list — this is the estate I have run in production, most of it somewhere with an auditor attached.