Freelance Announcement

• career

Now that I’ve (finally!) completed my degree, I’m venturing out into the real world. In the back of my mind I always wanted to be my own boss. I’ve had the entrepreneurial drive since before I knew what that meant. Like many of my peers, I sold candy and little toys to my peers when I was in grade school (at least until Mrs. Wiggins shut us down- shame on her!).

I’m now officially accepting contracts for design work through RabidAudio. That’s right, what started as a recording studio-turned-record-label-turned-personal-blog is now a consulting firm.

Areas

There are a few specialties I really want to focus on (and if you follow this blog at all, you can probably guess all of them):

Embedded Electronics

I love working with microprocessors, doing circuit design, doing PCB layouts. There’s just something so fulfilling about building something you can hold in your hand and use. By chance, I’ve got a large amount of experience with Bluetooth, particularly microprocessor-to-smartphone communication. I’ve also done work with other forms of wireless networking, e.g. mesh networks, Wifi-Direct, low-frequency RF. I’ve also been weening myself off the development platforms (Arduino and friends) and doing things the old-fashioned way (real C code burned directly to a chip in a circuit), something I’ll post about soon. All of these align conveniently with the current explosion of crowdfunding and the coming explosion of the Internet of Things. So bring me all your “smart-_x_” ideas or prototypes and I’ll bring them to market.

Startups

After the many student entrepreneur courses and clubs I participated in, combined with my experience at Flashpoint and a few projects on my own, I have a bit of experience in the business side of things, like how to learn what your customer wants, how to express business concepts elegantly, how to handle founder equity, or how (and when!) to obtain intellectual property protection. If you’re looking to build a repeatable customer discovery or customer acquisition process, or if you just want some honest startup advice, let me know.

I also want to specialize my work (technical and non-technical) to startups. If you can sell me on the viability of the company, I’ll be willing to take partial or occasionally complete payment in equity.

Software

I do a lot of web development for fun. The browser is like a common language that everyone speaks. The expansion of the Internet is largely thanks to the popularity of the web, and no other “platform” has lived as long and yet it will continue for longer still. So the evolution of the standards and practices is fascinating from a historical and techno-sociological level.

The evolution of tools is directly tied to this. There has been a recent explosion of languages, package managers, frameworks, and tools at the web developer’s hands.

I honestly don’t really enjoy the coding part of web development. What I really love is architecture. I like designing the most elegant system. I like mixing and matching these tools until I have code that is pleasing to read and also happens to work. The ideal web API server has no code, only a description of the tables and CRUD permissions, and the beautiful, clear documentation is self-generated (although no one needs to read it because the methods are so intuitive). We aren’t quite there yet, but we are actually very close.

Less code means less technical debt, less tests to write, and less time spent developing. If you want a site built on modern tools with code so elegant that you can read it like a book, let me know.

Audio

No surprise here, I love projects related to music or sound. I don’t really care what the tech is- from building tube amplifiers, guitar effects, synthesizer modules, etc. on the electronics end to coding DAW platforms, music apps, music tech startups, etc. on the software side, to totally totally off-the-wall things to just jamming. Come talk to me.