I have been working as a software engineer for 8 years. Over the past 2 years, I've been freelancing for startups, enterprises and everything in between.
The next stage of my business is pivoting away from pure freelancing work to a more complete offering of products and services.
TL;DR
I launched a business 24 months ago chiefly to work as a freelancer. I'm now looking to diversify and offer a broader suite of products and services to businesses. These include:
- 🧙♂️ Cloud architecture and optimisation
- ⚙️ Hands-software development
- 🌅 Engineering leadership, management and training
If you want to work with me, please drop me an email at me at joshghent.com
What I (now) offer
The key to any successful business is bringing the maximum amount of value to customers. This one is, thankfully, no different. I've chosen 3 key areas where I believe my skills and experience can make a difference.
🧙♂️ Cloud architecture and optimisation
Having worked as a software engineer for over 8 years, I've come across every type of cloud architecture imaginable. I've successfully transformed monolithic applications into microservices, migrated applications from on-premise to the cloud and optimised cloud infrastructure to save money.
When I work with any organisation, I focus on the following four pillars (in priority order):
- Observability. Helping organisations to get a handle on the numbers behind their products and developers to gain insight into their code. Having worked with a number of different observability tools, I can help organisations to choose the right one for them.
- Reliability. The only thing worse than an app that is slow is an app that is down. I help organisations to design, build and ship robust products that can scale as the business grows.
- Performance. Application speed is a feature and competitive advantage. Taking a holistic view, I can provide indepth insights into your applications performance and work with your team to improve it.
- Cost. No one wants an AWS bill that leaves you sobbing uncontrollably in a corner. I can help bring confidence and restore consistency to your cloud spend. I approach this by looking at the other three pillars and optimising them to reduce costs.
Generally, my approach is simple, I work with you to understand your business and goals. And then I build you a plan to achieve them by means of the technology you're building. I don't recommend a one-size-fits-all approach or that you need to hire a giant devops team to manage your infrastructure. I believe that the best solutions are the simplest ones and I work with you to find the right solution for your business.
⚙️ Hands-software development
I've spent the past 8 years working directly with code. My areas of expertise are back-end development (particularly API's and event-driven microservices) and infrastructure (particularly serverless). And I've extensively worked with both greenfield and legacy projects.
I've worked with lots of different languages and frameworks, but generally favour these stacks:
Stack 1
- Frontend: React/Next.js, TailwindCSS, TypeScript
- Backend: Node.JS, Typescipt
- Datastore: DynamoDB, S3, SQS
- Infrastructure: AWS, SST, Cloudflare Pages
Stack 2
- Frontend: Laravel
- Backend: PHP/Laravel
- Datastore: PostgreSQL, Redis
- Infrastructure: Render.com, Cloudflare
The skills listed above are not exhaustive. I'm always happy picking up new technologies and languages as required.
Software development goes beyond just coding. I take pride in producing robust code, complemented by concise documentation, and prioritize clear communication with both technical and non-technical individuals.
🌅 Engineering leadership, management and training
Encompassed within many of my roles is leadership and training. I believe I can help your organisation to train, and retain your engineers - and build a thriving engineering culture in the process. To do this, my approach focuses on
- Creating systems that empower the team to drive their own growth.
- Introducing fair and accurate metrics to motivate the team and measure progress.
- Building a culture of sharing and learning by introducing knowledge shares, pair programming and code reviews.
- Establishing psychological safety by means of blameless postmortems, retrospectives and one-to-ones.
- Making sure that communication between stakeholders and the team is transparent and effective, with shared goals and values.
I have primarily worked with engineering teams who have a headcount of 1-20 people and successfully introduced these practices to them.
📟 Fixed cost services
These fixed price services are designed to give your team a boost in a particular area. They are designed to be delivered in a short time frame and provide you with a clear plan of action to move forward.
If you would like more information about the services below please get in touch.
- Cloud Architecture Plan or Review - £1,300
- Website/Application Performance Audit - £1,500
- Observability Audit - £750
- Team Strategy Documentation - £2,500
- Team Training - £1,250
All prices are exclusive of VAT.
🎁 Products
In addition to the services above, I'm also working on a number of products that I have built as a result of problems observed in the organisations I have worked with. These include:
- LoginLlama - A suspicious login detection service for your applications.
These products can be provided to your organisation for a discounted rate and implemented by myself.
Work with me
If you're interested in the above, and want to work together, please drop me an email at me at joshghent.com. Or book a call with me here.
I look forward to hearing from you!