Hello,

I currently am open to a single part-time contract, to diversify my practice alongside my SaaS products which now are a time-boxed part of my weeks. The need for raw development capacity might have dropped lately, but it is not what I would like to offer.

The service I would like to offer:

The kind of contract I would be open to is active research against uncertainty, where you might have:

• a part of your codebase that became unclear and people avoid or its internal implementation slows down onboarding
• a topic that you have no time to dive deep in, but would unlock a particular feature set or integration if someone established technical and practical certainty

What you get:

A detailed assessment of your problem, Livebook prototypes consisting of runnable samples and my reasoning, frequent calls to constrain the design space, and optionally my participation in the implementation that follows.

Application examples:

• You have a few areas in your codebase that start to look like DAGs and interpreters, but you don’t have time to investigate if they can actually be unified and at what cost. I would bring my fresh eyes on this, assess if a pattern can fit, propose different APIs and their possible uses, then produce a few proofs of concepts.

• A partner needs you to expose RDF data and a sparql endpoint, but nobody in your team has the bandwidth to gain sufficient knowledge on the domain of structured data. I would study your codebase in light of the topic, propose designs and POCs, then either implement, hand off to your team, or even research specialists and brief them with concrete material.

• A fully functional hardware incremental POC to refine together what a device needs to actually do, and design its constraint space, before reaching out to hardware designers.

• Deep-diving on a topic and preparing a small workshop for a part of your team to kickstart their understanding and improve resource location in a new field. I have enjoyed running workshops in a collaborative way in the past.

Experience:

I’ve been an independent developer since 2015, and worked either alone or with client teams to build tooling from initial discussion to maintenance over the years. I chose to transition all my work to Elixir in 2018 and did not look back since, even if I often bring in other ecosystems when they fit.

Since 2022 I have been building two B2B SaaS products. I am now looking for focused contracts as described above.

I have usually been brought to projects at their inception, when there is no spec, no certainty about what should even be done, and have interacted with users, owners and stakeholders to build something useful. It is a truly interesting experience and a lot wider than tech. The kind of contract I describe is the same thing, bringing clarity to a blurry picture, but I would like to apply it to existing projects with a constraint set to adapt to.

The best way to see how I think would certainly be to take five minutes to browse my website where I publish articles: https://lucassifoni.info. I can most often show something I’m working on in a call.

Conditions and availability

I work remotely from France and currently have 23 hours per week (3 days) for this kind of work. I am okay with fully asynchronous communication and progress video recordings but prefer frequent calls for the kind of work I described in this post. I now prefer to price those contracts as a fixed sum, only paid if the deliverable provides the desired clarity.

Contact

You can email me at contact@lucassifoni.info.

Best,
Lucas