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.

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.

years in production: 30
industries shipped in: 6
recommendations on LinkedIn: 45

Six industries, one job

Each one was somebody else's expensive problem. Every figure is from the record.

2017–2021 Live TV streamingSling TV · 120 endpoints moved onto a new stack, without ever taking it down. 120+

2023–2025 Healthcare referralsBlockit, now Alluvium Healthcare · Referrals booked across three record systems instead of dying in a fax queue. 17s → under 1s

2021–2023 Hotel worker safetyROAR For Good · The real-time layer behind buttons hotels had a legal deadline to fit.

2014–2017 Healthcare paymentsOptum, part of UnitedHealth Group · The bank connections behind healthcare payments.

2000–2005 Business phone systemsAvaya · Messaging infrastructure, and the escalations nobody below the top tier took.

1996–1998 Internet telephonyVocalTec · This is where the thirty years starts.

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

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.

Yan Odnoralov · Tech and engineering leader, two exits · Mark's client · June 2026

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.

Walt Martin · Sling TV · worked with Mark · June 2020

45 recommendations, every one public. Read these on LinkedIn

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.

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. Start a discovery chat.