Independent engineer · 30 yrs in production
Something in your business is quietly expensive. Usually it is a job someone still does by hand.
I find the one that is costing you most and build the software that ends it. Thirty years of production systems — streaming, healthcare payments, patient referrals, worker safety, phone networks — and it is the same shape every time. You work directly with the engineer who builds it.
Waypoint 01 · The pattern
Different businesses, the same broken process
A dental practice, a law firm and a freight company have nothing in common from the outside. Underneath, the expensive part is the same: information arrives in one shape, it is needed in another, and a person sits in the middle.
Somebody retypes it every day. The same numbers moved from one screen to another by hand. You are paying for the hours, and it is where the mistakes come from.
You find out weeks later. A claim denied, an order never sent, a payment never landed. Nobody sees it until the money is missing and the trail has gone cold.
It only works because one person knows how. The real process lives in one person's head. When they are away the work stops, and when they leave it goes with them.
It stopped fitting a while ago. It was right for the business you had three years ago. Growing now costs more than it should, and everyone can feel it.
Waypoint 02 · The distance
- years in production
- 30
- industries shipped in
- 6
- recommendations on LinkedIn
- 45
Waypoint 03 · The record
Six industries, one job
Each one was somebody else's expensive problem. Every figure is from the record.
- 2017–2021 Live TV streaming — Sling TV The service was live, watched by millions, and running on a back end that had outgrown what it was built for. 120 endpoints moved onto a new stack, without ever taking it down. The first live-TV streaming service in America, and the category leader from launch until late 2019 — 2.69 million subscribers at its peak in that stretch. 120+
- 2023–2025 Healthcare referrals — Blockit, now Alluvium Healthcare Booking a patient meant reaching into whichever record system their clinic happened to run, and searches that touched several of them timed out at seventeen seconds. Referrals booked across three record systems instead of dying in a fax queue. Its job is to get a referred patient booked with the right doctor instead of the referral dying in a fax queue. Its customers include HCA, CommonSpirit and Memorial Hermann. 17s → under 1s
- 2021–2023 Hotel worker safety — ROAR For Good A button on a housekeeper's belt is only worth anything if the alert reaches somebody in the building within seconds, from a cart in a stairwell. The real-time layer behind buttons hotels had a legal deadline to fit. Wearable panic buttons for hotel housekeepers working alone. Chicago, Seattle and New Jersey wrote them into law — New Jersey's was the first statewide law of its kind in the country — so hotels had a deadline, not a preference.
- 2014–2017 Healthcare payments — Optum, part of UnitedHealth Group Money moving between banks and a healthcare payment system, where a mistake is somebody's medical bill and it is found long after the fact. The bank connections behind healthcare payments. Number 6 on the 2016 Fortune 500, serving 133 million people. Its own annual report puts it plainly: in 2016 it processed more than half a trillion dollars in billed charges.
- 2000–2005 Business phone systems — Avaya Messaging infrastructure that hundreds of thousands of businesses answered their phones through, where a bad release is every one of them at once. Messaging infrastructure, and the escalations nobody below the top tier took. Avaya makes the business phone systems and call-centre software large organisations run on — there is a good chance the phone on your desk has its name on it, and more than 90% of the Fortune 100 are its customers.
- 1996–1998 Internet telephony — VocalTec The businesses buying it had no reference point for a phone call that went over the internet, so every sale started by explaining what the thing was. This is where the thirty years starts. An internet-telephony company, selling software that carried a phone call over the internet in 1996.
Across those systems
·
A synchronous import redesigned onto background jobs and 66 times faster, with the memory ceiling that capped file size gone
·
Seventeen-second timeouts brought under a second on searches serving millions of queries
·
Improvements of ten to a hundred times in critical production systems
·
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, on call for the consequences
Waypoint 04 · In their words
From the people who paid for it
Each answers a fair question about hiring one engineer instead of a firm.
Is the AI part real, or is it hype?
I hired Mark to build out a customer portal for us […]. Mark is likely the most knowledgable AI-first programmer I know. Not only did he deliver the project requirements but also taught our team a valuable skill — how to leverage AI agents at scale with custom loops. Our engineering process won't be the same. Highly recommend Mark.
Will it actually land, or will it drag?
I've had the privilege to work with Mark on a recent and successful backend modernization project at SlingTV. Over the course of this one-year long effort, Mark proactively took on some of the most challenging aspects of the solution in languages that he was previously unfamiliar with… contributed directly to the timely delivery of a complex solution with the high performance and quality SlingTV's customers expect.
What happens when you leave? Am I stranded?
…when the project moved on from him there was no tribal-knowledge gap to guess our way through — everything we needed was already written down. Mark is exactly the kind of engineer who makes the people around him better.
Do you understand my business, or only code?
Mark is the person I go to when a business rule needs a definitive answer… He's precise, thinks through the downstream implications before answering, and never gives a quick guess when the details matter.
Are you a fly-by-night?
I've had the opportunity to work with Mark through three separate employers, having hired him in each case. Each time the role was different and each time Mark showed up with the right skills to meet the challenge. There are few people I trust like I do Mark.
45 recommendations, every one public. Read these on LinkedIn
Waypoint 05 · How it goes
How this goes
Four steps, and the first one costs you a quarter of an hour.
01
A conversation. Fifteen minutes about what is actually costing you — where the time goes, what breaks, what you have already tried. No form to fill in and no sales call.
02
A straight proposal. In writing: what I would build, what it costs, when it lands, and how we will both know it worked. In plain language, not a deck.
03
You see it running, weekly. Working software every week rather than a reveal at the end. If something is going the wrong way you find out in week one, while it is still cheap.
04
It runs without you thinking about it. Deployed, watched and written down, so your team can pick it up. Or leave it running with me and never think about it again.
Waypoint 06 · Arrival
So what is the expensive one?
Tell me what your business still does by hand. You will get a straight answer about whether software is worth pointing at it.