A developer who ships small things
Fourteen years of software, the last six of them on my own, from a desk two streets from the river in Lisbon.
I started out in agencies, building other people’s ideas quickly and rarely finding out whether they worked. Then four years inside a payments company, where I learned what happens to software after launch — the migrations, the on-call weeks, the features nobody had the authority to delete.
Since 2020 I have worked alone. There is no team, no roadmap and no growth target. There is a short list of products with real customers, and a rule that I only start something I could finish in a season.
How I work
I write the smallest honest version first and put it in front of one person. If they keep using it after a fortnight, it earns more of my time. If they do not, I have lost eleven days rather than a year, and I have learned the thing I was actually trying to find out.
Almost everything I have shipped got smaller between the sketch and the release. That is not modesty — it is the only technique I have that reliably works.
Working together
I take on one or two consulting projects a year, usually with small teams who have a product that works and a codebase that has stopped being fun. Four to eight weeks, one clear problem, no retainer. If that sounds like your situation, write to me and tell me what is slow.
Right now
- Building
- Fieldnote — meeting notes that end in decisions rather than transcripts.
- Reading
- The Design of Everyday Things, again, and a stack of old Bell Labs papers.
- Learning
- Enough Rust to make the Cutlass build step stop being the slow part.
- Away from the desk
- Bouldering badly, and walking the same six kilometres along the river.