How I work

1. A conversation

Twenty or thirty minutes by phone or email. You tell me what you have and what worries you; I tell you honestly whether this is a systems project or a house call. If it is a house call — a slow laptop, a printer, a password — I will point you at My Computer Therapy — that is faster and cheaper for you.

2. An assessment

I look at what is actually there: every device, every service you depend on, every place where one failure would stop you. I write it down in plain words. I quote a fixed price for the assessment before I start, and the written result is yours whether or not you go further.

3. A design

Built from boring, proven parts — the equipment and software that has stopped trying to be clever. Designed offline-first: the important things keep working with the uplink unplugged, and the internet is used second. You get a diagram, a parts list you buy yourself (I recommend, you own), and a fixed price for the build.

4. The build

With you present where possible. I explain each decision as I make it. I test the finished system the way it will actually fail — I pull the uplink, I pull the power, I restore a backup — before I call it done.

5. Hand over the keys

You own the hardware, the accounts and every password. The documentation is a short runbook written for the person who will be standing in front of the machine, not for another engineer. If I vanished tomorrow, a competent person could pick it up. That is the test.

6. Keep watch — if you want

Optional. The monitoring described on the Monitoring page reports to you and, if you keep me on, to me. I tell you when something stops, and what I did about it.

What I don’t do

• I don’t hold your passwords hostage, and I don’t build anything only I can operate.
• I don’t put a device on your network that stops working when its maker’s cloud goes away.
• I don’t publish client names or case studies. If you want a reference, ask me and I will ask them.