$40 USD per hour, negotiable for the right cause.
I'm a 10 year veteran of the Software Engineering field, starting with LAMP stack on AWS EC2's free tier before I earned my bachelor's degree in CS. I've extensively used PHP, Perl, Python and especially Go ('Golang' as so many call it) from developing my own websites to gathering requirements and shepherding the deployment of fully new features inside a micro-lithic platform.
Most of my experience is in the development, performance optimization and maintenance or troubleshooting of APIs. I also have a strong familiarity with web scraping, starting way back with simple PHP scripts and moving all the way into Selenium and Puppeteer/Playwright powered navigation of websites that used entirely dynamic JavaScript interfaces.
I've worked in very dissimilar environments across time:
\* A small startup developing Wordpress and LAMP stack sites for varied clients
\* A large team in corporate cubicles on shared RedHat systems writing billing and alerting scripts and maintaining Apache-hosted CGI websites in Perl using subversion in-house
\* A large remote with team spread across the country in developing a white-label affiliate cashback and coupon plugin platform in Go running on k8s/Terraform in GCP for fortune 100 clients
I love the craft of programming. While I was at that last job I made sure to read every page of the team book club's assigned reading, from '101 Mistakes in Go and How to Avoid Them' to 'The Pragmatic Programmer'. In my free time I read the O'Reilly book on 'The Fundamentals of Software Architecture' just to improve my own skills. I also program in my free time, building useful projects for myself and my family and friends. I sincerely consider 'Software Engineer' my identity above most other identifying traits about me.
I'll be totally honest about why I left that last job, though: overuse of AI "agentic" tooling. I pioneered use of GitHub Copilot at the company with one other developer, having joined the beta through the wait list when it was still brand new. I enjoy Copilot, and I think line completion is a near-perfect middle-ground use of this technology (LLMs), if not a bit too pricey for real ROI. The board of that company, however, owned the company by majority stake and included some big players who make RAM or are part of the bubble. Sometime last summer every Chief in the company started pushing very hard for the use of LLMs in everything, including monitored usage of Cursor and then Claude Code. After a RIF taking out a third of the development teams last December my colleagues stopped caring about their work, dumping larger amounts of less refined AI-generated code for review than ever before. I lost all the time that I had to actually code (the only reliably fun part of this profession) and gained more and more work reviewing with inevitably longer review cycles pointing out subtle bugs AI tools produce because they statistically predict "how" code should be written instead of understanding why.
"AI"/LLM tools make bad or burnt out programmers much worse, and have not shown great ability in my experience except in prototyping code (which is very annoying to make production-ready, especially when security is concerning, maybe even slowing the process down). Oh and it's absolutely astounding at (drum roll please...) recalling less frequently used words for me when they're in my vocabulary but I can't quite remember them, words that are "on the tip of the tongue" as they say. Worst of all, with these tools you can't predict how much any given prompt will cost you in number of tokens from your allocated limit and you can't know if it will get stuck in a loop burning your cash.
I'll also be honest in that I've got one foot out the door: I'm taking Anatomy & Physiology coursework online at my local community college while I'm on unemployment. I'm really enjoying it and I'm enrolled in the night classes for my EMT-B certificate this fall as I'm afraid I'll have to leave software development altogether because it's no longer a fit for my skills. I've put in dozens of applications and of the calls I've had so far it seems most interest is in how badly I want to manage any given hiring company's AI slop. I can't help but just be honest, as there's not much left to lose.
If you have any work you need done and you think I might be a fit, DM for my portfolio, resume etc. I'm excited by the idea of any work that might still be a fit after all the time and effort I've invested refining my abilities.