Freelance & Contract Work
Multiple concurrent client contracts across web, mobile and cloud — the district where scope and deadline are the real constraints.
The other half of The Exchange: the stalls. Several contracts running at once, across web development, app development and cloud deployments, for a range of clients.
Individual client work is under wraps, so this entry is about the practice rather than the products.
Running several at once
The hard part of concurrent contracts is not the code. It is that every client reasonably believes they are your only one, and all of them are right about the deadline they were given.
What made it workable:
- Estimating in ranges, out loud. “Three to five days, and here is what moves it to five” survives contact with reality. A single confident number does not.
- Deciding the stack once per client, not once per feature. Context switching between four projects is expensive enough without also switching conventions. This is the habit that eventually became BugToBuild.
- Writing down what “done” means before starting. Almost every dispute I have seen in contract work traces back to this being left implicit.
The range is deliberate
React and Node on the web, Flutter for mobile, AWS underneath. Being able to take a project from a UI through the backend API to a deployment means a small client gets one person instead of three handoffs — which is the entire value proposition of hiring a full-stack developer for contract work.
It is also why my skill list is shaped the way it is. It is not breadth for its own sake. It is the specific set of things needed to carry something end to end without stopping.