Out-of-the-box thinking for Not-in-a-box solutions!
I began my foray into software development at the young age of 9, developing simple text games in BASIC. In high school, I was a rebellious teenager, and my grades suffered dramatically until I was scouted by a guidance counselor who thought I simply wasn't being challenged enough, and how right he was! I would spend my afternoons attending an adult education centre where I eventually became CCNA certified.
I attended St. Lawrence College, and graduated "with distinction" in their Computer Networking program. Regrettably, the municipality in which I grew up had no major tech industry, so it was difficult for me to find work in this field. So, for the past 6 years, I have been mostly a remote worker.
Throughout the past 6 years, I have felt it critical to ensure that I keep my exposure to different things highly varied, as I did not want to become a "hammer" and specialize on one thing just for all of my other skills to atrophy and become useless. So, as a result, I have become a "Jack of none, master of all," as it is very helpful to understand how all of the cogs of technology move, instead of just one small component. Therefore, if it involves servers, websites, programming or any of the like, there's a great chance I've worked with it before (Exceptions: Mainframes and mobile devices).
Most recently, however, my focus has been sharpening my cloud architecture skills as well as diving really deep into Laravel. Ultimately, I find it important to strike a balance between systems operations and systems programming, as it would be a disservice to myself if I allowed one field to atrophy since they depend on each other.
Work Terms
I conduct my work in blocks of 3 hours each. Each 3-hour block is guaranteed to that client in which I am conducting the works for; therefore, it is useful to communicate with me in advance the ideal times for us to work together so I can guarantee a rapid response time during those blocks.
Please understand that, unless you wish to hire me full-time for 6 months or more, that regrettably you are not my only client. Prospecting can be a very time consuming process, so I try and fill up each week with as much work as possible, and this does result in me sometimes performing some work in parallel. As a result of this, my responses can sometimes be delayed for a few hours if you have questions outside of your block. With that said, if there is an emergency, I will always be immediately available for a response (barring a crisis of my own), and have in the past cancelled meetings with one client to help assist another with a crisis.
With all of this said, I will always consider my available bandwidth, and will always meet my deadlines.
I communicate with most clients over Skype. I also provide a cell phone number that is strictly for emergencies only.