Commercial

Cost Modelling

I built cost models for shipping maintenance-record reconciliation.

See its threads in the world

Used on

Stories where it mattered

2023 · Consulting business-development desk

Making architecture decisions arguable instead of announced

Situation
Technology choices were announced rather than argued, so nobody outside the room could challenge them and debates reopened later.
Task
Make the reasoning behind each decision outlive the decision, without imposing heavy documentation.
Action
I set a standing practice: name the choice, name the closest shortlisted alternative, and link to where the why lives, in a small table.
Result
The practice carried across projects and became what new decisions arrive with, so decisions can be reviewed on their reasoning.
View in the world
2021 · Hybrid.Chat conversational platform

High availability for a bot runtime that insisted on being in memory

Situation
The chatbot platform's runtime holds conversation state in memory, so under high availability any pod restart dropped live conversations.
Task
Survive pod churn without rewriting the conversational runtime the product was built on.
Action
I checked alternative frameworks, found the same limit, and kept the runtime: sticky sessions, state persisted to Mongo, and Redis pub/sub to close duplicates.
Result
The platform ran multi-container with state surviving restarts, and the design documented its failure modes, including those the fix introduced.
View in the world
2023 · Hybrid.Chat conversational platform

Wanting to build it in house and buying instead

Situation
The bot platform needed web push notifications, and my instinct was to build it in house for future flexibility.
Task
Decide between building and buying, separating engineering reasons from personal preference.
Action
I wrote down what I wanted from in-house, weighed it against what the release needed, and recorded the preference and the decision against it.
Result
We shipped on the vendor, and the recorded trade-off made later customisation questions easy to answer.
View in the world
2026 · Consulting business-development desk

Finding out what the cloud bill was actually for

Situation
Cloud spend was climbing, and no single person could see which servers it went to because billing access was split.
Task
Establish the real footprint before deciding what to shut down.
Action
I scripted a sweep across cloud projects that listed every virtual machine with its project and state, then sequenced access, pruning and backups.
Result
Pruning followed the inventory instead of guesswork, and the sweep set the order of what to stop.
View in the world
2026 · Consulting business-development desk

Overturning a hiring verdict by doing the review myself

Situation
A senior engineering candidate had been assessed by a reviewer I trusted, and the recommendation was already written.
Task
Decide whether I agreed by reading the candidate's actual work rather than the review of it.
Action
I reviewed both pull requests, issue discussions and documents independently, then wrote my assessment point by point, differing on the algorithmic work.
Result
The decision changed on the merits, and the reviewer could see which points I accepted, setting the expectation that recommendations are examined.
View in the world
2025 · Consulting business-development desk

Taking services away instead of adding them

Situation
Two pipelines had each been split into many microservices that shipped, failed and were debugged together, adding cost without independence.
Task
Make the case for consolidation on operational cost, with the boundary authors in the room.
Action
I wrote up the reasoning for a loosely coupled monolith, keeping only the seams with distinct scaling or failure characteristics and merging the rest.
Result
Fewer services to deploy, fewer cross-service failures to trace, and each remaining split could be defended individually.
View in the world
2025 · Consulting business-development desk

Reading the bill before optimising the model

Situation
Model spend was climbing across products, and the instinct was to change models or shrink prompts without breaking the bill down.
Task
Cut cost through a mechanism we could explain, without switching to a cheaper model and losing quality.
Action
I reviewed usage per project so consumption was attributable, saw identical completions paid for repeatedly, implemented prompt-completion caching, and tracked the bill afterwards.
Result
Cost fell sharply with no change to models or outputs.
View in the world

Goes with

Proposals and PricingSOWsFinance AIDelivery ManagementInfrastructure ProvisioningAWS

Throw me a paper plane

Write a line; I’ll find it in my inbox.

✉ Email▤ Résumé☎ Call✆ WhatsAppLinkedIn · GitHub · QR in the world