About

I build software that businesses often use for a very long time.

I am a consultant and a custom full-stack application builder with over 40 years of experience. I love solving hard problems with technology in the cases where technology is the right and efficient answer. Not every problem needs software thrown at it, and a fair share of this job is saying so to someone who was hoping to hear otherwise.

How I work

Sixty hours a month, then we put it in writing.: No client gets more than 60 hours in a month or 120 in a quarter without a fixed-price plan with milestones and a formal change process. I learned this lesson the hard way. Years ago a client buying nearly all of my time pulled back with almost no notice, and their cashflow problem suddenly and chaoticlly became mine. This cap exists to keep the client base broad enough to prevent this in the future.
I have fired clients.: Desceptive people, toxic people and unrealistic expectations are always red flags you should not ignore. This is probably enough said about this.

What you can buy

RediDraft is intelligent document assembly currently marketed to estate planning firms. It came to me sideways.

In 1996 I became CTO of Interactive Professional Software, on contract through my own company, to work on a product called FastDraft that two partners at an Atlanta firm had built in 1991 to stop rebuilding the same documents by hand. Interactive became Valeo Software, and in 2004 Valeo closed. The software did not. It came to me, along with the firms whose practices ran on it. That handoff taught me what the product actually is: less a piece of software than a promise to the people who depend on it.

By 2010, Windows XP was aging out and firms were still drafting in a product nobody supported. I rebuilt the whole thing from scratch and called it RediDraft. Every RediDraft customer from that day to this one is a former FastDraft firm. Not one was ever added by a marketing campaign.

This October a new engine ships. RediDraft One is independent of any word processor, runs in a browser or on the desktop, and drafted documents in production internally for nearly two years before it went anywhere near a customer. The philosophy has not moved since 1991: your language, not our content library, and the same inputs produce the same document every time. That is the only behavior that belongs near a trust instrument.

RediDraft One's prices are published, every number of them. You do not have to schedule a call to find out what something costs. A price that only exists inside a sales conversation is a price designed to move, and it moves toward whoever is more comfortable in that conversation.

The practice

The consulting work runs through FasTrac Consulting. My wife Ann and I started Fastrac Software in April 1995. She named it, and she built all of the original branding and sales material leveraging her marketing career that predated our marriage. The company was founded to ship a sales force application, and that application never shipped. The concepts and even some of the source code was reused in one client project after another instead. That turned out to be the actual business opportunity for us, and with a few side trips and gaps it has been ever since.

These days I mostly build web applications using Elixir and Phoenix, with either LiveView or a React single page application on the front end. I came to Elixir about three years ago. Before that most of the web work used PHP and Vue. I still read both fluently.

Elixir suits what I actually get hired for: long-lived, unglamorous software that is still expected to be running long after anyone remembers who wrote it.

The tooling the practice runs on is a suite I built for myself over the years and still use daily: CRM, support, invoicing, deployment, knowledge management. People ask why I do not sell it. I thought about it and decided against it. That same SFA/CRM adventure in 1995 proved this type of SaaS application has a very complex and very long sales cycle. To do it at all requires a large organization with dedicated sales, implementation and support staff. RediPlatform earns its keep by being exactly what the practice needs. I don't have to worry about existing external users if a major change is wanted and there have been many. The day it has to be what everyone needs, it stops being the critical internal resource the practice needs.

This site is my personal one.

Companies get sold, spun out, and closed. This is where I write things down regardless: the design decisions, the trade-offs, the occasional dead end, and what it costs to keep software alive for decades. Posts run newest first on the home page, and there is an RSS feed if you would rather they came to you.

For work, the practice is at fastracconsulting.com.