I'm putting aside around four months this year for consulting. Likely late October to end of March, with a gap in December.
Here are some ideas for projects that work well for short engagements:
- Isolated or research-heavy features. Eg adding decorrelation to materialize took ~6 weeks and didn't require changing much existing code.
- Testing/fuzzing/debugging. Eg I spent a lot of time at tigerbeetle fuzzing and debugging races in the storage engine (eg, eg). I'm also interested in building tools to speed up debugging (eg).
- Optimization/observability. Eg I've been having a lot of fun this year using tracing to track down problems that would be invisible in a regular profile (eg, eg, eg, eg).
- I also had some success last year with advisory consulting, where I'd charge a small amount per month to be available on slack/zoom to answer questions and point towards useful research/code. Eg when xtdb were adding a sql frontend I helped them avoid all the mistakes I made a few years earlier at materialize.
This is a non-exhaustive list though - feel free to get in touch if you have other ideas. I'm open to experimenting.
People keep telling me I don't charge enough so I'm aiming to up my rates to $3000/day.
Let me know at jamie@scattered-thoughts.net if you have a project that might be good fit, or if you want to intro me to someone else that might.
Jamie is a lion you let loose on some of the toughest technical problems in your code base. Jamie is fiercely independent and will deliver on skunkworks projects. He cares deeply. You can trust Jamie to do it right, and see it through.
-- Joran Dirk Greef, CEO TigerBeetle
Jamie was fundamental to building the foundation of Materialize. Not only was he a phenomenally productive engineer, he was able to synthesize lots of academic research to solve complex problems from first principles.
-- Arjun Narayan, CEO Materialize
Jamie is a first principles thinker with a deep understanding of systems and algorithms. He is fearless in the way he approaches problems. Jamie's research on staged compilation saved our team many person years of effort, and his training and support was crucial to our adoption of Julia. I hope to have the opportunity to work with him again soon.
-- Molham Aref, CEO RelationalAI
Jamie brought a degree of rigor and theoretical knowledge that took the company to places we never could have gone otherwise. From exploring the implications of language semantics to building high performance database engines, he didn't just help us get things done, he helped us get them done right. As a result, we were able to explore in weeks what could've easily taken years
-- Chris Granger, CEO Eve