Services

Four kinds of work, and the systems of my own that back each one up. I am one person, so you talk to whoever is doing the work.

In plain terms

I build the parts of a business that have to be right: the pipeline that moves money or data, the tool your staff use all day, the integration between two systems that were never meant to meet, and the infrastructure underneath all of it.

Websites and search visibility

Sites that belong to you, and finding out why the one you have is not being found.

  • Static-first sites on infrastructure you own — your domain, your repository, your hosting account. No platform lock-in and no monthly fee for the privilege of continuing to exist.
  • Technical audits — what is actually slow, broken or invisible to a crawler, separated from what merely looks untidy.
  • Local search visibility — where you really rank on the map for the searches that matter, which listings are unclaimed or wrong, and what the businesses above you are doing differently.
  • Migrations off a platform — moving a site off a builder without losing the URLs, the rankings or the mail.

I built the audit tooling I use — map rank and Google Business Profile gaps, site health and age checks, rendered performance scoring. It also taught me that generated audits produce confident, plausible, wrong findings, so every number in a report I hand over is checked against its own evidence first.

Infrastructure

The unglamorous layer that decides whether everything above it stays up and stays reachable.

  • DNS, domains and TLS — migrations that do not drop mail, certificates that renew without anyone remembering to, and a record of what changed.
  • Email deliverability — SPF, DKIM and DMARC, rolled out in stages rather than switched to enforcement and hoped for. Separate sending identities so bulk mail cannot damage the reputation of the domain your invoices leave from.
  • Cloud configuration — Cloudflare and AWS — edge hosting, access control, storage, scheduled jobs, backups that are actually restored from occasionally.
  • Secrets and access — credentials in a managed parameter store, read at run time. Not in a file, not in an environment variable, not in the repository.

This site's own domain was attached to a zone already carrying live Google Workspace mail and two production subdomains: eighteen DNS records before, nineteen after, nothing else touched. That is the standard — additive, verified, and reversible.

Software

The things a business runs on internally and rarely shows anyone.

  • Internal tools and dashboards — admin interfaces, review and approval workflows, dashboards over live data. Built to be operated rather than demonstrated, which mostly means handling the cases a demo skips.
  • Back-office automation — the spreadsheet somebody reopens every Monday. Recurring imports, reconciliation, reports retyped from one system into another.
  • Data pipelines and warehouses — getting data out of vendor APIs and into something you can query, keeping the original exactly as it arrived so parsing can be re-run without paying for the data twice.
  • Research and backtesting that can say no — criteria fixed in writing before the work starts, no lookahead, and every result compared against chance rather than against zero.

I ran a pre-registered study on whether a mechanical system could pass a funded-trader evaluation. All five gates passed and the study still concluded no, and I published that. If you want a number that supports a decision already made, I am the wrong person to ask.

Integrations

Making systems talk to each other that were never designed to, and keeping them talking.

  • AI features that behave — model calls constrained to a schema so a feature cannot improvise, routed through a gateway so every call has a log, a rate limit and a cost attached, with a retention policy that keeps the cost records and discards the client's text.
  • Financial and accounting APIs — Schwab, Interactive Brokers, QuickBooks Online. Cost basis, journal entries, reconciliation that has to balance to the cent or it is worth nothing.
  • OAuth that keeps working — one component owns a token and refreshes it; everything else consumes it. The alternative is four copies of a credential and no idea which one went stale.
  • Webhooks, apps and everything between — GitHub Apps, inbound mail, scheduled syncs, and the retry logic that must never double-submit the thing it is retrying.

Six AI tasks run in production in a product of mine — sorting an inbox, drafting a weekly status, reading a license, writing page copy. None of them is given tool access and none is retried in a loop: a refusal is recorded once and the feature says nothing rather than inventing something.

What working with me is like

You talk to the person writing the code. Nothing is lost between a salesperson and whoever ends up doing the work, because they are the same person.

You get the source. It lives in your repository, on your accounts, under your domain. If you want to take it elsewhere or hand it to somebody else, nothing in how it is built stops you.

I will tell you when something is a bad idea. Including when the thing you asked for is more expensive than the thing you actually need, and including when the honest answer to your question is no.

I would rather scope it smaller and finish. A working thing you can use on Friday beats an ambitious thing that is still nearly done in March.

Starting a conversation

Tell me what you are trying to accomplish rather than what you think you need built. The useful first message is the problem, roughly how often it happens, and what it costs you when it goes wrong.

jim@secondchanceopportunities.org

There are no prices here. The work is custom, and a tier list would either overcharge you or commit me to something I have not understood yet. Scope first, number second.