Hi there! I'm Steve Phillips, an award-winning software developer and creative problem-solver.
I've been programming for 16 years, and have extensive startup and freelance experience which I am excited to leverage to make shit happen.
I've done a ton of Python (15 years), JavaScript (7 years), and concurrent Go ("Golang") programming (14 years) on the backend, plus many years of React (7 years) and Svelte (5 years) on the frontend.
Lately I've been creating RAG-enabled AI chat bots that answer questions about an arbitrary data set (e.g., company documents or instructional videos).
Thanks to LLMs -- specifically Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o, GPT o1, and GPT-4 before that -- my programming productivity has approximately doubled, meaning I get $300 worth of programming done per hour, at the highest quality.
Additionally, I am accustomed to playing the role of startup CTO, and I'm looking to do more work as a fractional CTO. This is especially valuable for projects that need software built and need help clarifying which approaches, technologies, and services should be used to solve a problem in the most efficient way.
In 2022 I was brought into a project after the founder read about me in a book ("Coders", by Clive Thompson). Together with this founder's team, the software I designed and led the development of has won many international innovation awards -- so many that she was nominated for Person of the Year in 2023, in her home country of Switzerland.
I was recently vetted by Arc.dev and I completed their "30-minute" programming exercise in 4 minutes. My solution was so simple that the interviewer had to triple-check that it was correct. (It was.)
My normal rate is $150/hour, but from now until December 22nd or when I get my next gig, whichever comes first, it's $100/hour, as I just started looking.
You can get in touch with me at steve@tryingtobeawesome.com .
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