What I do as a startup engineering contractor

After a few years, I'm back to contract work and it feels great. Some prefer the stability of full time employment but give me the chaos of early stage startups any day.

My expertise is in early stage startups or greenfield projects and moving quickly to build a viable product or prototype while setting up the tech infrastructure necessary for success. I can act as a one-man team while founders build their actual team, writing code but also setting up servers or cloud infrastructure, key management and documentation, running interviews and making recommendations for hires.

I don't take equity so for equity-conscious founders it's a great way to build momentum in the early days.

I've also moved to a full-time contract model, charging a flat fee by the week instead of an hourly rate. I've found that startups always have plenty to do and nobody likes filling out itemized invoices anyways. And I'm not sure anyone reads anything more than the bottom line anyways.

So billing is simple and I'm available for ~45 hours a week. Startups can see me as effectively a founding engineer, which can make the transition to an actual founding engineer seamless.

Not in the market for a contractor but know someone who is? I offer a commission / finder's fee for a direct introduction that leads to a contract.

It's an offer that's good for a lifetime. Even if a contract isn't signed for a 1, 5, 10, 20 years from now, I keep records of how I meet a client and will make sure you get paid.

Halfway through 2025!

It's been 18 months since moving to New York City. I was familiar with the city before, having visited repeatedly over the years but this is the first I've lived here.

What have I learned about the city? Networking here is a breeze. There's a social and ambitious culture but unlike other tech hubs, every industry in the world is right here. That diversity means the startup scene is filled with innovative ideas grounded in real world problems.

And of course walking or taking a subway 15 minutes to a networking event beats an hour and a half in traffic to Pasadena any day.

If you're in NYC and a startup founder, developer or designer and want to meet up and talk shop, get in touch. Even if you're not looking for a contractor, it's always great to hear what people are working on and I'm happy to offer any advice or suggestions.

What I'm up to right now

I just wrapped up a contract so I'm taking a couple months off-contract to work on personal projects. Another small joy of contracting!

I've been on a self-education kick with two great resources: Math Academy and Casey Muratori's Performance Aware Programming series.

Math Academy is a fantastic resource. I'm 80% through Math Foundations III and excited to start Mathematics for Machine Learning. I'll write more in the future but so far I can't recommend it enough.

Casey Muratori's course is about getting back to the kind of low level programming that I cut my teeth on when I started programming. I learned how to code in the demoscene in the 90's, writing C and assembly language on a 386 computer and measuring everything in clock cycles.

Web dev treats that as outdated and unnecessary. And maybe it is. But going back to understanding and writing code at the CPU level is like going home and a refocus on the low level fundamentals makes everyone a better programmer.

Simplify, simplify, simplify

I've been on a simplification kick. As the industry has barrelled towards greater complexity, it's important we consider ways we can approach problems with the simplest solutions possible. For me, this means going all in on Golang. It's small, performant, comes with plenty of batteries included and has managed to stick to a philosophy of simplicity for over 15 years. And most of all, it's easy to read, which is crucial as a contractor since code has to be written with future developers in mind.

I've also returned to html and css, both of which have advanced considerably since the early days of SPA frameworks. And Sqlite, a rock solid and highly performant database engine.

Modern web tech frameworks are extremely complicated. Whether they're over-complicated or just complicated enough is up for debate but there's always room to step back and ask ourselves, how can we accomplish this in the simplest way possible.

More on all of this soon but for now if you're in the startup scene get in touch and let's build.

tech@prisen.co