Work with me

Small businesses run on work that gets redone by hand every week: retyping an order into a second system, chasing an invoice, rebuilding the same report, checking whether the backup ran. I take that work away, on software you own, and I write down what it must do before I build it.

How we work together

1. Discovery call - 30 minutes, free. You walk me through a normal week. I ask what gets redone by hand, what gets copied between two screens, and what breaks when someone is away.
2. What I can help with - written, free. A list. For each item: the work it removes, roughly what it takes to build, and whether it is worth doing at all. Some items say no. You owe me nothing at this stage.
3. Audit and plan - the deliverable is a written specification and a test plan, in plain language. They are yours, and they are complete enough for someone else to build from if you would rather.
4. Build - in iterations, against the test plan. Each milestone ends with the tests running in front of you.
5. Run - monthly, optional, cancellable. Backups verified, updates applied, restores drilled on a schedule. Or a handoff, the documentation, and I am done.

What it costs

Everything is estimated from a rate of $150 per hour.

The audit and plan are billed at that rate, quoted as a flat amount before we start. A single integration usually takes half a day to a day. A business still running on paper takes longer, and you get the number in writing before anything begins.

The build is quoted as a flat amount from the plan, estimated at the same rate. Once the number is agreed, it does not move. If it takes me longer than I expected, that is my problem, not your invoice.

Run is a fixed monthly amount, cancellable.

Data, privacy, and compliance

Automating a process means moving personal information around. In Quebec that triggers specific obligations, and most of them are not technical:

• A named, published person responsible for personal information.
• Why each piece of data is held, for how long, and its destruction at expiry.
• Access, correction, deletion and portability requests: who answers, how fast, in what format.
• An incident register and a notification procedure that runs on a clock, not on a log file.
• A privacy impact assessment when a system is acquired or rebuilt, and when personal information leaves Quebec.
• An assessment of the vendors your data passes through.
• The loop that keeps it all true: risk register, review, corrective action.

I am not a lawyer and I do not certify anyone. What I deliver is the implementation and the written procedures: the register, the privacy impact assessment, the breach decision tree, the per-application data export matrix, and evidence that the backups actually restore.

Where AI fits

Writing code stopped being the expensive part of this work. What is left is choosing what to build, on which tools, and proving it does what was asked. None of that is automatic. I use AI tools every day and they make the build cheaper for you. They do not decide anything. A system that was six months of work in 2022 is six weeks now. The ways it can break did not shrink with it. That is why the test plan gets written before the first line of code.

The detail is on the Method page.

Background

I have been building and shipping this kind of system since 2013, and running my own businesses on it since 2021. Before the software, the work was electronics, firmware and instrumentation: circuit boards, closed-loop process control, lab and production test benches. That is why a process with a sensor or a machine in it is not out of scope when a job needs one.

Out of scope

To self-qualify honestly: I work as an individual contributor, either solo or embedded in your team. I don't take on mobile app development, public-facing front-end work, brand or visual design, or full-time engineering management.

I do regularly build simple internal UIs when they're part of the system I'm delivering: dashboards, admin pages, internal forms. The goal is for the system to be usable, not to win a design award.

Industries I've shipped in

• Small-batch food manufacturing (Chocolat Infini)
• Electronics and software consulting and PCB manufacturing (Connaxio)
• Quantum sensing R&D (SBQuantum, Université de Sherbrooke)
• Autonomous aerial systems (VAMUdeS, 3x AUVSI-SUAS winners)

Clients

A few of the organizations I've delivered work for, mostly during my Connaxio years:

• Human Garage - CRM, social network and programs synchronisation
• Fermes Valhalla - greenhouse automation and farm-wide network management
• Révolutionnez.ca - infrastructure and back-end support
• Lions Bay Mushroom Farm - automated CO2 and humidity management with remote control

Book a 30-minute call and we'll go from there.