Services

I focus on web site infrastructure design, operations and maintenance, site strategy, and “firefighting”. Call me in if you are:

• having trouble scaling your site,
• handling problems with your applications,
• wondering about what processes and procedures to put in place to scale not just your site but your technology team to best support your organization,
• in need of a mentor for your CIO, CTO or other technology leaders,
• or if you are lost in the wilderness of a complex problem, under fire from your business and customers because your site is not performing to their expectations.

These are the problems I focus on and have in–depth experience resolving. I focus on pragmatic solutions: yes, a fully-redundant set of paired data centers may well be the best solution, but it may not be the most practical solution if your site is down right now.

If you need routine coding changes, routine application development, routine web site design: I'm not your guy.

My process is routine, I'm fairly certain anyone could mimic it:

1. Get an understanding of what the problem is (even if it is a proactive project to design a new application or infrastructure, it is still a problem to be solved)
2. Get an understanding of the players involved, trying to assess who is and is not a key player.
3. Review your processes, procedures and methods: are they appropriate for the work you are doing, the problems you are or will encounter?
4. Review the relevant code, applications, operating systems and environments.
5. Make recommendations or proposals (depending on whether you're under fire and need the problem solved “right now” or if we have flexibility with time).
6. Work with your team to iterate through potential solutions, focusing on maximizing the benefits to your organization while minimizing my costs to your organization.
7. Wrap up. You pay me only if I've solved your problem to your satisfaction.

As I wrote: that's a pretty routine process: triage, analyze, iterate through solutions. Pretty much any consultancy will sell you some variation on that process.

What I offer

Experience. Not certifications. Not degrees. Not titles. Just raw, hard lessons–learned experience. Experience from three Olympic Games’ web sites. Experience from managing IBM's Corporate web presence for five years. Lessons learned from over ten years of designing, developing and managing high–profile web applications and sites.

Now, you could disregard this as an arrogant, self–serving pitch, and you would be partly right. You could hire, instead, a top–tier firm, with a project manager ($125/hr), two miscellaneous staff (@$125/hr each), and potentially every technical resource you are willing to pay for (@$65—$1000 / hr depending on the specific skill and years of experience).

The cost for me to walk in the door: $0 (well, plus reasonable travel expenses which we'd agree upon up front). The cost for the top-tier guys to walk in the door, potentially? Possibly also $0.00, but possibly, also, $4000 for one day.

In the end, we'll both give you potential solutions to your problem, quite possibly the same solution. It's up to you to decide what is the most practical, pragmatic, and applicable solution for your organization. It's up to you to decide how much your problem is costing your organization, and whether it should be solved at $375 per hour, or $500—$1000 per hour.

In the interim I'll be solving problems for someone else, potentially your competitors, for only $325 per hour.

If you would like me to take a look at your problem, please feel free to contact me at inquiry@artific.com or +1 (347) 408-0372.