Consulting Services

Currently, services are only available to Indigenous led organizations, or by referral.

Doing good work is incredibly hard work. The world is constantly weathering your organization with new challenges to overcome and new opportunities to grasp. I work with your organization over the long term to create capacity and capability amongst your team, preparing them for what is to come. I advocate for practical solutions and foster cooperation over competition.

Perhaps we can work together to build a better, more hopeful future.

Vision & Focus

Building capacity and capability for a more hopeful future.

My work has two sides:

The majority of my time, I work with international technology companies working in the open-source space to build a healthy technical ecosystem and a sustainable future. A healthy ecosystem requires collaboration as well as competition. A healthy company operates as an citizen of the society which has created the need for it to exist. A healthy open source project fulfills the hopes and dreams of the contributors which participate in it.

What time I can mange, I spend supporting and engaging with Indigenous led efforts. This company is founded on unceded Lək̓ʷəŋən territory, and the Indigenous community here has invested in me during my youth. It is my duty to invest back. Creating long term, impactful, healthy investments into Indigenous communities in Canada, as well as globally, is the overriding purpose of this company.

Services

As a consultancy, my company can provide a range of services. I do not produce products, or operate client infrastructure.

Open source maintainership

Ongoing development and maintenance of a growing open source project is no easy task. The main service I provide is long term, ongoing maintenance services. I can help your open source project reach your goals.

As part of this arrangement, I will happily accept deep, hard technical work, examples include: implementing complex topics like Raft's Joint Consensus, adding a WASM plugin architecture to your project, and doing broad scale data model refactors.

Maintainership is a retainer style service that includes monthly independent-contributor hours as well as full access to all other company services.

I prefer Rust projects, particularly in the distributed systems, networking, or embedded space. I'm open to other things, particularly Typescript.

Technical Copywriting

From technical blog article, authoring in depth tutorials, building references, or even maintaining large project websites, I've had a part in it. There are many examples of my writing on on the blog section of this site. I have supported documentation efforts of multiple large projects, such as Vector.

A couple non-negotiable notes:

• I do not write 'benchmarketing'. I'm not going to compare your product to your competitors and show how it is certainly better. I will show a range of scenarios and explain how I ensured the benchmarks were fair, and let you choose not to publish, though.
• If you publish my work, I reserve the right to post the final (or revised) version on this website. I will always link to your official article. This is to preserve a record of my work, as well as ensure readers who visit my site, but not yours, also see the work we partook in together.

Workshops & Training

I offer flexible, friendly, casual workshops or for groups of up to 6. Content is custom catered to your needs.

• Engineering: Approachable, half day workshops.
  • Distributed Systems
  • Observability
  • Infrastructure
  • Git & Github
  • Intro to Networking (HTTP, TCP, UDP, gRPC)
  • Static site generation
  • Benchmarking with Criterion
  • Observability in Rust
  • Rust development
  • WASM plugins for Rust
  • Chaos Testing
  • Networking best practices
• Engineering Management: One off or regular 1-3 hour Q&A or planning sessions.
  • Rust in production
  • Rust at scale
  • Rust over the entire business lifecycle
  • Hiring Rust engineers
• Industry Directions: 1-2 hour whirlwind topical tours. Suitable for executives.
  • Databases (OLAP/OLTP)
  • Serverless/Function-as-as-service
  • Storage
  • Software Foundations

Technical review or assessment

You can contract me to provide technical assessments of your ideas, your existing projects, or new features. This could be as simple as code review, or as in depth as architecture analysis.

Business advice

I have broad ranging experience working with international developer communities and been involved with the computing industry over 3 continents. I have previously worked within Canadian, German, Chinese, and American industries. I'm happy to share any knowledge I have gathered, discuss growth internationally, make key business connections, or assess the impact things like a software Foundation might have on your project.

Hiring leads

I am happy to provide you occasional leads on diverse candidates. I will work with your company to find folks who are a good fit through my interactions with our community. I work with many underrepresented folks within the Rust and distributed systems community.

This is not a paid service, and we must have had a pre-existing business relationship in the past.

Policies

I endeavor to be easy to work with. I understand you have your own requirements, and you need things to be correct for any due diligence.

I have a few policies to be aware of:

• Provincial and federal guidelines place specific requirements on our business relationship. It is critical to our relationship we respect these guidelines.

  Some key bits include that I:

  • must actively sell and market my services in our industry.
  • must provide and fully control all my own hardware, software, etc.
  • can freely reject work.
  • cannot benefit from employment programs from your company.
  • work towards identifiable project deliverables. (Such as roadmap milestones.)
  • must maintain several mandates with clients.
  • can freely renegotiate our mandate at each renewal.
  • am able to hire staff.

  If you wish to hire me as an employee, you may do so by contacting me personally to ensure you have a foreign payroll entity in Canada which can issue payroll correctly, or use something like Remote.com.

• Our business relationship must be founded on mutual goodwill and intent. I provide a service to your company, and I will do so as passionately, carefully, and correctly as possible. If I find myself no longer motivated to work with you, or you are not satisfied with the outcomes of my work, we will terminate the contract under good terms and part ways like reasonable people.

• I am happy to sign limited term Non-Disclosure Agreements. I do not accept unlimited term NDAs, I am not interested in taking on liabilities which cannot be practically enforced, as this risks damaging the enforcability of the rest of our contract. Please choose a reasonable NDA term, and I will be very happy to accept it. If your company does not have an NDA yet, I have one we can use.

• I bill monthly by invoice. They are expected to be fulfilled within 30 days. Since I have no interest in legal matters, invoices left unpaid after 30 days result in immediate mandate termination, no exceptions.

• Occasionally, I am blessed with more business than work. New clients may attempt to 'buy-out' an existing contract with me. Your company will have the opportunity to renegotiate our contract whenever:

  • I take on a new client.
  • A new client wants to 'buy-out' an existing contract.

Mandates

The company maintains the following mandates:

None at this time. Focused on internal research.

Previous mandates of the company:

• Vector.dev: Open source maintainership supported by Timber.io.
  • Added proof of concept WASM plugins.
  • Supported release process over x86, aarch64, and armv7 architectures as well as Linux and Windows.
  • Advised on community chat migration to Discord, helped foster new user community there.
  • Undertook architectural and data model RFCs.
• Ferrous Systems: Specialized training module development.

Efforts

This company has previously commited time or made financial contributions towards:

• Natives in Tech Conference 2020 & 2021, operated by the Natives In Tech community.

Contact

When forming relationships with technology companies, I prefer to reach out to companies I think would be a good fit for my services. Of course, you're always welcome to introduce yourself and your organization through consulting+tech@hoverbear.org.

Indigenous led organization? You can introduce yourself via consulting+indigenous@hoverbear.org. I'd love to learn more about you! I'm interested in finding ways I can effectively support your efforts in a good way.