A few months ago I wrote a blog post with the title “ShippingBytes did not work for me”. It did not age well at all. I now own a business, and ShippingBytes has its own VAT number.
I bought this domain when I was looking for a way to decouple myself from my
career because I feel this blog should be for myself, instead it was all about
Gianluca as a developer. As you can see I was looking for a .com because
that’s what real businesses still need, I thought it was a “tech enough” name and
it was available so here it is.
I tried to blog on it, but the quality of my writing was aligned with my pretty low motivation at the time. When I revisited them, I decided the outcome was not good enough - it did not spark the passion I have for the field.
When I started sharing my desire to run a little consulting firm almost everyone I talked to was surprised and they thought I already had one. Surprisingly enough I worked as a full-time employee for my entire career until now.
Why now?
Career is a pendulum. For many years open-source contributions, conferences were a big thing but they were always something I did for myself, often supported by my employer but in a very unstructured way.
Just before COVID, I decided to take a break from all of that. I joined a couple of startups and the pandemic changed many things in the field. Somehow it helped me stay true to my intention to avoid “extra work” for some time - probably for too long. I ended up feeling “alone” from a work point of view. Since COVID, according to my CV I changed 4 jobs and I never saw a colleague in person.
I ended up pushing aside the soft skills, not purely related to coding that I used for the majority of my career for a bit too long.
When I turned to the job market it did not spark joy to me, after one year of looking around I could not find a job spec describing what I wanted to do, they were all too AI-sloppy or restrictive.
For me, those were all signs that it was time for me to figure out my own sweet spot. Experimenting with building not only software but systems, running my own business has already pushed me out of my comfort zone into pretty boring things. Figuring out how to open a bank account, bureaucracy is pretty fun here in Italy, I had to reach out to old friends and managers to find some work. Some of those tasks are more fun than others but they require some of those skills that I left behind and that build what I am.
In a field that looks like it is living a revolution I prefer to feel free to make my own mistakes instead of having to suffer the one made from somebody else.
So now what?
I have a few product opportunities that are ongoing, those run on their own ShippingBytes as I said is a consulting business. It is a way to reach out to people I collaborate or work with and see what they are up with and how I can help. If you are one of those I am here!
I decided to set it up as monthly subscription, with a price you can find written on my work site because I think this is the right way to build a collaboration where we are all involved in the value creation. A subscription means I work with you on outcomes, not hours.
Investing time in estimating tasks or billing hourly communicates the wrong things. I am not the one who should figure out how long a task should take. The customer knows how much time it should take. I can help you get the best out of the time you want to allocate, and if things change along the way - fine! We will adapt.
This is why I don’t want to make estimates, but I want to collaborate not only from a code perspective but also in roadmap creation.
What is this business all about?
Ok, software development and consulting - but what exactly?
- Open source maintenance and community: Whether you’re all in with open source and need help maintaining repositories, or you just have a few repos to engage with your community, I can help. I’m happy to review pull requests, triage issues, manage releases, and implement solid community collaboration workflows.
- Software development and maintenance: from Proof of Concept to keeping alive programs that serve their purpose
- Kubernetes development: I served as RelEng for K8S, developed operators and other extensions. If you have code that interacts with the Kubernetes API, I am here to help
- Observability and troubleshooting: I’ve been running my own code since my first day as a developer. I was involved early on with opencensus, opentracing, opentelemetry, and I enjoy making systems understandable
- DevOps and automation
- Apache Arrow, DataFusion, workflow engines: I’ve worked for various companies building their own databases and experienced GenAI from the inside. I want to help tame this beast!
I know it sounds like a lot - how can I be helpful across all these fields? The reality is that with almost 15 years of experience, I’ve seen many successful architectures and navigated through failures. I’m here to keep working on software that enables people to efficiently build and run internet-scale systems. I like unknowns and to make my hands dirty.
What am I looking for?
Luckily for me I got my first two contracts signed even before starting the business. I set three as limit and I am not looking for more.
I worked with early-stage startups for the majority of my career and I like the environment. If you read this article carefully, you’ll see that I’m also looking to expand into product-oriented companies (not just as a developer). Angel investment is something I am actively working on.
At this stage I am looking to reconnect with old colleagues and build new connections!