Are you looking for a Software Developer or an Engineering Manager / CTO?
If your company wants to improve an existing product, its software development process or develop a new product, I can take on a new project starting in mid-August.
I am an Engineering Manager with a focus on Solutions Architecture, System Design and System Analysis. I have experience building teams, establishing processes, working closely with product managers and managing technology projects from concept to completion (taking the role of Product Owner). I have hands-on experience in all the aspects of the Software Development lifecycle, including performing functions of DevOps and SRE (setting up and managing cloud infrastructure on AWS and GCP, observability tools, CI/CD pipelines). A bit of experience with Machine Learning Computer Vision and early stage Product Management.
My primary focus is web back-end (PHP, Laravel), but I have also worked with mobile apps and front-end (React, Vue.js).
Our potential collaboration could take one of three forms:
1. If your company needs technological solutions but lacks a tech team, I provide a complete package: from initial analysis and doing software development myself to ongoing maintenance and managing the cloud infrastructure.
2. In cases where your tech team requires interim leadership or specific expertise, I step in as interim CTO, also filling in any existing knowledge or skill gaps. I can audit your team(s) and software development process to improve speed of your team and/or the quality of the product.
Not sure where did you get this number. $45/hr was the standard expected rate for software development houses and agencies 7 years ago in Eastern Europe. So now it probably is around $70-80/hr. For $30/hr you could get a talented junior freelancing, if you're lucky. But that comes at the cost of quality and efficiency, which offsets the savings from the seemingly lower rate considerably.
OP is seemingly open to the idea of hiring individual freelancers. If they can skip the middleman (agency), that rate effectively doubles (From what I've seen, the developers working for the agency get paid around half of what the client pays).
Depending on the available budget, tech stack, intensity of your involvement (and the functions and competencies you can cover) and the seniority of the devs required, I would additionally use these three channels:
* Senior dev hiring marketplaces like Toptal, Proxify
* If my project uses PHP, Laravel, I would check Laravel Partners to find out reputable agencies and software development houses (perhaps there are similar listings for other ecosystems as well?)
* Post a contract job listing on LinkedIn
* Ask around in my network of engineers (everyone knows someone)
Head of Engineering type of person with additional experience in early-stage product management and business administration. 15+ years experience in IT. Formed and led software development teams, IT projects and participated hands-on in various aspects of software development lifecycle. Experience filling various missing roles: devops, infrastructure management / cloud services, system design as solutions architect, product ownership.
Location: Riga, Latvia (EU)
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Mostly web, backend (primarily PHP/Laravel and MySQL, a bit React/Vue), Linux, but also have worked with smartphone apps (React Native, others) and 3D (Unity, C#)
Looking for a C developer with experience in PHP internals (or willingness to dive deeper into PHP internals) to build together a debugger (similar to Xdebug) for production environments.
E-mail in my profile. I'll send more details in e-mail about market, business model, value proposition, etc.
My background consists of a mix of software development, business development and innovation, engineering management and executive roles. Have experience building a start-up.
There's a nice iterative process called Customer Development from the Lean Startup methodology. Use this to validate your initial assumptions, to fine out the Business Model (Value Proposition and the target audience) and generally understand pain points of your potential customers (how much does the problem currently cost them, how they solve it currently, what are the possible alternatives, etc.).
Hard to give a complete advice im just a few sentences, but basically this framework gave me the understanding necessary to quickly build out (validate) business ideas before anything is really developed. To oversimplify it - try selling before building it. That will give you a very good understanding of the potential market size, the actual needs of people and so on.
Perhaps someone could help out solve my 20 year old mystery? When I was a kid, I had briefly access to a computer. My memory might be mistaken on the details, but I just can't find on Google what kind of computer it was. It had 5 inch floppies, I am pretty sure that games on it only used four colors (cyan, magenta, white, black). I think it had joystick similar to Atari's. It had Bubble Bobble game.
Edit: Photos of Commodore computers look really close to what I remember, but not exactly. Also, Latvia (where I live) just recently had regained independece from USSR and it was a time when the market was flooded with clones for everything. E.g. instead of NES kids had famiclones like Zhiliton, UFO or in my case, I think it was Dendy.
Edit: Floppy reader was in-built, not external, as far as I remember.
Edit: Sorry, more like 30-year mystery. Somewhere around beginning of 90s.
Edit: I think it also had game Alley Cat.
Edit: Thank you everyone for chiming in! This inspired me and gave extra keywords for further investigation and narrowing down the exact model / make. Gonna continue searching on Sunday.
The colors sound like normal PC CGA graphics, but the joystick sounds like maybe a PCjr (or compatible), which, IIRC, sometimes came with a joystick, since the machine itself had built-in joystick ports. The CGA graphics could be explained by the games being written for PC CGA graphics, and not the better, but obscure, PCjr graphics.
But… 20 years? That’s like, 2002. PCs were abundant then, and CGA graphics were already ancient, and use of joysticks in games were already relatively uncommon; mouse & keyboards were the norm.
You could click through the different platforms bubble bobble was released for on mobygames to see which one looks familiar. The DOS version seems to have had a CGA 4-color mode but it wasn't cyan/magenta. Amstrad CPC looks like a candidate:
https://www.retro-exo.com/exodos.html has "eXoDOS/eXo/eXoDOS/Bubble Bobble (1988).zip" which you could try with DOSBox. Other commenters mentioned that the DOS screenshots use the red/green/yellow CGA palette but plenty of CGA games switched video modes for a tiny extra bit of variety.
On that note, does anyone know whether the original IBM TTL monitors supported "hardware emulation" of alternative palettes?
On a compatible Amptron(?) display we had, the brightness and contrast pots had an integrated switch. If you pulled on the brightness adjuster, it switched to a green-black monochrome palette, while the contrast control switched it to the red-green-yellow palette.
I just played it and it's pretty fun. If I force CGA mode, the Taito title screen is in white/cyan/magenta but the rest of the game (first two levels at least) are in yellow/green/red.
That sounds like CGA. Could have been any IBM compatible, can you describe the shape of the case and whether or not the floppy drive(s) were built in or external?
CTO / product owner/management type person. Previously spent 7 years running own software development agency (10 employees), 2 years running a co-founded company in start-up environment, now I have returned to the job market and work as a CTO for a medtech company (10 years old, 20 employees).
Experienced in bizdev, project management, systems administration, software architecture, development team leading / building engineering org etc.
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Are you looking for a Software Developer or an Engineering Manager / CTO?
If your company wants to improve an existing product, its software development process or develop a new product, I can take on a new project starting in mid-August.
I am an Engineering Manager with a focus on Solutions Architecture, System Design and System Analysis. I have experience building teams, establishing processes, working closely with product managers and managing technology projects from concept to completion (taking the role of Product Owner). I have hands-on experience in all the aspects of the Software Development lifecycle, including performing functions of DevOps and SRE (setting up and managing cloud infrastructure on AWS and GCP, observability tools, CI/CD pipelines). A bit of experience with Machine Learning Computer Vision and early stage Product Management.
My primary focus is web back-end (PHP, Laravel), but I have also worked with mobile apps and front-end (React, Vue.js).
Our potential collaboration could take one of three forms:
1. If your company needs technological solutions but lacks a tech team, I provide a complete package: from initial analysis and doing software development myself to ongoing maintenance and managing the cloud infrastructure.
2. In cases where your tech team requires interim leadership or specific expertise, I step in as interim CTO, also filling in any existing knowledge or skill gaps. I can audit your team(s) and software development process to improve speed of your team and/or the quality of the product.
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You can contact me at juris@d3.lv