I turned in my two weeks notice April 23rd, 2007 to Sunflower Broadband subsidiary of the Lawrence Journal-World. I know this only because it just so happened that my last day ended up being Cinco de Mayo which makes remembering our anniversary thankfully very easy.
My last corporate job was also my best, so good I came back to the company after taking a year and a half tour through various KC tech companies that sucked for one reason or another.
My various roles at the company were the absolute perfect breeding ground to grow into a consultant. Most of my time was spent running critical ISP services and writing custom software for the company, but the company was involved in so many things it was easy to get pulled into problems like:
- antiquated nearly unsupported accounting systems
- ancient Solaris newspaper printing press software
- satellite issues receiving cable content
- Emergency Broadcast System and 911
- Fleet operations and running a good NOC
- Customer service and marketing needs
- Running of the medium/large web properties of the day
- Crazy side projects like trying to build an early Peloton
All of those has proven useful with clients over the years, but it was really the experience across so many areas that made it easy to adapt oneself to the client's situation at hand.
The Process
I've written about the process in more depth (it was my first post to be on HackerNews actually), but in short I focused on learning areas that weren't tech, reduced my debt, increased my savings and jumped when I had a contract that supposedly would have made the first 6 months easy. Spoiler it didn't.
Starting your own business is hard and scary, but 18 years later I'm VERY glad that I did.
The Result
I've had the pleasure to work with so many amazing people at great companies. Often doing important things with technology. The constant learning, improving and running a business can be tiring but it is never boring!
It's been my pleasure to bring in great business partners like Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Jeff Triplett. Amazing employees like Jacob Burch, Lacey Henschel, Stephen Spencer, Kojo Idrissa, and Catherine Holmes. And have former employees like Flavio Curella and Daniel Lindsley over the years.
We've even had a sub-contractor around for nearly all 18 years Greg Newman!
Speaking of sub-contractors, we also currently have Natalia Bidart, Velda Kiara, Mark Wirblich, and Sean Parsons helping us out on various projects.
In the past we've had a string of really amazing contractors work for us. We've had Dr. Russell Keith-McGee, Idan Gazit, and the late Malcolm Tredinnick. I'm probably forgetting at least a few people over the full 18 years and for that I apologize.
The Clients
We've done massively scaled and fun projects with companies like Netflix, Sony, and The Wharton School. We've helped with critical infrastructure, internal skunkworks projects, and companies moving to Python, Django and/or the cloud. From cancer research to to custom furniture to event tickets and AI we've had a lot of fun helping a lot of our clients.
The Work
It is exciting to see your work go live and to see it talked about in the media, but the most meaningful work to us is helping improve the development teams we work with. From introducing new tools and better processes we absolutely love leading them down a path to better code, in less time, with less hassle, and of course, less bugs!
Some things we've done:
- Reduced cloud spend 90% while reducing page load time 50% for large websites like Politifact.com
- Numerous code reviews
- System architectural help, design, and sanity checking
- Taught ops automation with Python to scores of staff at companies like KPMG and Jump Trading
- Moving clients to Kubernetes and streamlining lining CI/CD pipelines for efficiency
- Helped companies move to Python, Django and the Cloud like DealerTrack and eMoney
- Solved performance issues in too many companies to list
- Building startup MVPs from the ground up in all sorts of industries
- Acquisition due diligence
- Filling in as team lead or fractional CTO when clients have an unexpected staffing issue
- Python and Django upgrades to keep critical systems running and patched
- Building Python AI into EdTech and ecommerce products and consulting with some of the behind the scenes players in that space.
- And bespoke development of course!
Here's to another 18 years!
P.S. Oh and do let us know if we can help your company. We have some availability in our calendar coming up this summer due to a company canceling their projects because of the silly tariffs!
