SEEKING WORK - Remote, California-based

Hi there! I'm Steve Phillips, an award-winning software developer and creative problem-solver.

I've been programming for 16 years, and have extensive startup and freelance experience which I am excited to leverage to make shit happen.

I've done a ton of Python (15 years), JavaScript (7 years), and concurrent Go ("Golang") programming (14 years) on the backend, plus many years of React (7 years) and Svelte (5 years) on the frontend.

Lately I've been creating RAG-enabled AI chat bots that answer questions about an arbitrary data set (e.g., company documents or instructional videos).

Thanks to LLMs -- specifically Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o, GPT o1, and GPT-4 before that -- my programming productivity has approximately doubled, meaning I get $300 worth of programming done per hour, at the highest quality.

Additionally, I am accustomed to playing the role of startup CTO, and I'm looking to do more work as a fractional CTO. This is especially valuable for projects that need software built and need help clarifying which approaches, technologies, and services should be used to solve a problem in the most efficient way.

In 2022 I was brought into a project after the founder read about me in a book ("Coders", by Clive Thompson). Together with this founder's team, the software I designed and led the development of has won many international innovation awards -- so many that she was nominated for Person of the Year in 2023, in her home country of Switzerland.

I was recently vetted by Arc.dev and I completed their "30-minute" programming exercise in 4 minutes. My solution was so simple that the interviewer had to triple-check that it was correct. (It was.)

My normal rate is $150/hour, but from now until December 22nd or when I get my next gig, whichever comes first, it's $100/hour, as I just started looking.

You can get in touch with me at steve@tryingtobeawesome.com .

## Links

https://tryingtobeawesome.com

https://linkedin.com/in/sdphillips

https://github.com/elimisteve

FreeCodeCamp.com is showing that there's a hunger for learning JavaScript for people in their 20s and older, but what about teaching people (in the same age range?) other skills?

I also mention FCC because they've made it so you can add your content instead of their JS content, and poof, you have a learning platform!

Well-written, and hopefully captures the imagination of soon-to-be coders!

I'd love to hear a follow-up post once she starts getting paid work so she can tell us exactly how she did it.

I'm Steve, and I'm a healthy eater and cheapskate.

From 2002 to 2005 I researched nutrition and supplements _a lot_. Long story short, what's cheap, healthy, "pleasurable" (non-sexually), and fast/easy to make? Vegetables, whole-wheat bread or brown rice (pasta), an assortment of nuts, a protein shake (protein powder, milk, flax seed powder, spinach, and blueberries), and vitamins/supplements (multivitamin, fish oil, others I take for brain health/performance).

Works great! And when I eat out (again non-sexually) I have chicken breast, turkey, or fish.

Awesome project! Is being near Montreal necessary given that this is a software project? What about remote collaboration?

It's not necessary but would definitely help. Actually, living in NYC or around the I-87 corridor would also be good, it's close enough to me that I could run down there for a weekend if need be.

One solution is to use Google Docs and more, but to only store encrypted data there. This gets you the convenience of SaaS without the privacy issues (see http://rdist.root.org/2011/05/09/encrypted-google-docs-done-...).

Priv.ly has an interesting approach to this somewhat analogous to the above: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/229630898/protect-your-c...

Tent is a protocol for distributed social networking that I'm very optimistic about. You can message me at https://elimisteve.tent.is (sign up at tent.is).

From the title, I was hoping to read a crushing indictment of web developers for mostly creating useless crap.

Sadly, it's more like the opposite: a shiny button inviting us all to view useless crap.

Some of those are definitely not useless to kids. Remember when you were a kid and some crabby old biddy gave you crap for 'wasting your time'? I do. As for adults and the web: How 'useful' is porno? (Same principle)

I really appreciate what StatusNet is doing, but I've found that it's just not useful enough to... use. It's Twitter but more free and with far fewer users. That's rather different from Diaspora and Tent.io's visions.

FYI: Today, Tent.is -- the first implementation of Tent.io, a protocol for fully decentralized social networking -- went from 0 users to 2000. In a day.

...And since it's free, I bet it'll grow MUCH faster than App.net which, after TONS of media coverage and endorsements from the likes of not just Scobleizer, but The Washington Post and even fucking CNN(!), got just ~12,000 people to sign up by the deadline.

Specific sites aside, I'm glad that people are actively creating alternatives to the centralized, corporatized, developer-unfriendly services that currently dominate the landscape.

Even if tent.is now has 2000 users (including myself) over 24 hours, it does not mean that it will reach 12,000 people. With this kind of projects, people tend to subscribe, play with it a few minutes and then forget about it.

Adoption for a user is tied with friends' adoption. Most users won't see any interest in switching from Twitter/Facebook to a decentralized network, because they don't understand the importance of privacy and controlling your own data.

To make moystard's point more clearly–and with a chart!–, http://xkcd.com/605/

That is some pretty amazing putting-words-in-my-mouth. I mean, if we're going to call out fallacies.

I write Python and Go code every week, and have since I started using Go almost 2 years ago.

I appreciate Go because I'm working hard to become an engineer who builds robust software rather than a sloppy hacker that throws scripts together. One significant difference between the former and the latter is carefully handling errors versus not.

Python's error handling seems much more succinct only because most of us don't both handling errors at all! Every other line throws many exceptions, but we ignore this for convenience. (Those ugly "except ___:" statements ruin our oh-so-cool one-liners!)

Bottom line:

When I feel like having fun making something simple and getting it done _fast_, I use Python.

When I feel like building something that _needs_ to work -- especially anything that does more than one thing at a time, or should use all cores efficiently -- I use Go. And yes, that means taking error handling seriously.

1. Meetup Groups; 2. Startup Weekend; 3. Hackerspaces

Any Meetups related to the web -- events for developers, UI/UX, and biz meetups -- are great for networking. I'm a developer who gets emails from designers who want to talk on a big job that requires custom dev. You should be able to do similar -- find people who want to take on a job that requires more design or marketing than they can (or want to) personally do. (This may be a good way to meet people directly who need your services, not just people who will give you referrals.)

Attending a Startup Weekend hosted in your town is a _fantastic_ way to meet people, especially if you can talk shop with them like many HNers can.

It's quite the commitment, but co-founding a hackerspace has worked wonders for me. I meet a lot of smart people -- many of whom aren't web developers -- who then refer people they know to me.

If you're a designer or biz person, wander into a hackerspace near you.