Six plates. One press.
Fig. 4 — The catalogue.
Five printed, one blank.
Each plate is a kind of job I set often enough to have a routine for. Pull one from the index and the proof prints beside it. The sixth plate is blank, and that is not an oversight.
The catalogue
Six plates · pull one from the drawerNot sure which drawer your job is in?
It might be 06.
Scripts &
automation
If you can describe it as the same sequence of steps every time, it can be a script. Most of them take a day or two, and then they never ask for anything again.
- What is on the plate
- Renaming, sorting, moving and de‑duplicating files in bulk
- Watching a page, folder or feed and telling you when it changes
- Nightly jobs: backups, exports, reports that land before you do
- Glue between two tools that were never meant to speak
- A one‑command version of the thing you currently do in fourteen clicks
- Typical run
- One to five days.
- Good fit
- A repeatable task with clear inputs and outputs, and one real example you can show me.
- Not a fit
- Anything needing a human judgement call at every step. I will say so, and we will automate the part around it instead.
- You get
- The script, a README a colleague can follow, and whatever it needs to run on a schedule without me.
Document
processing
Documents are only difficult in bulk. One invoice is a five‑second job. Four thousand invoices is a pipeline, and a pipeline is something I can build once and hand over.
- What is on the plate
- Pulling fields out of PDFs, invoices, statements and forms into a spreadsheet or a database
- Converting between formats at volume — PDF, DOCX, CSV, JSON, XML, images
- Splitting, merging and filing documents by what is inside them
- Checking documents against rules and surfacing only the ones that fail
- Generating thousands of documents from one template and a spreadsheet
- OCR for scans, with an honest accuracy figure before you rely on it
- Typical run
- Three days to three weeks, depending entirely on how consistent the documents are.
- Good fit
- You can send a stack of real examples, including the ugly ones and the ones that break.
- Not a fit
- A few hundred documents, once. Doing it by hand will be cheaper, and I would rather tell you that than invoice you.
- You get
- The pipeline, a report of everything it could not read, and a way to re‑run it whenever the next batch arrives.
Websites,
hand-built
Written by hand in HTML, CSS and a little JavaScript. Fast because there is nothing in the way, and the site you are reading is a fair sample of it. If you already run WordPress, or the job genuinely wants a CMS, I will work in that too rather than talk you out of it.
- What is on the plate
- Portfolio, studio, landing and brochure sites
- Documentation sites, and technical writing that renders properly
- Small shops and booking pages wired to a payment provider you already use
- WordPress and its neighbours: themes, templates, fixes, and speed passes on what you already have
- Rebuilds: the same content at a tenth of the weight
- Accessibility and performance passes on sites that already exist
- Typical run
- One to four weeks.
- Good fit
- You want something specific and well made, and you can tell me who will be editing it after I hand it over.
- Not a fit
- A thousand‑page platform with a content team and a governance workflow behind it. That wants an agency, and I am one person.
- You get
- Every file, deployed where you want it, and pages — or an editor login — you can change yourself without calling me first.
Data
plumbing
The unglamorous pipe between the thing that makes the data and the thing that needs it. Nobody photographs the plumbing, and everybody notices when it leaks.
- What is on the plate
- Moving data between systems on a schedule, with retries and alerts
- Reconciling two exports that disagree, and explaining why they do
- Webhooks, API clients, and small services that sit quietly between products
- Spreadsheets that have quietly become databases and need to become one properly
- A dashboard fed by a source that refreshes itself
- Typical run
- Two days to three weeks.
- Good fit
- Both ends already exist and you can get me credentials for a test account at each.
- Not a fit
- Real‑time infrastructure carrying serious volume. That wants a team and an on‑call rota, and I am one person.
- You get
- The pipeline, its monitoring, and a runbook for the morning the other end breaks — because eventually it will.
Maintenance
& rescue
Somebody built something. It works, mostly. Nobody knows how it works, and they have left. This is the most common job there is and almost nobody advertises it.
- What is on the plate
- Picking up an abandoned script or site and making it run again
- Writing down what an inherited system actually does, in plain English
- Small fixes and upgrades on things nobody wants to touch
- Getting a project off a platform that is shutting down, data intact
- A written second opinion before you commit to a rebuild
- Typical run
- Starts with one fixed‑price day of reading. After that we both know enough to talk about the rest.
- Good fit
- You have access to the source, or to the hosting, and ideally to both.
- Not a fit
- Nothing, really — but if a rewrite is honestly cheaper than the rescue, that is what I will quote you for.
- You get
- It running, notes on how and why, and a list of what I would fix next in the order I would fix it.
The blank
ticket
This plate is deliberately unprinted. The five above are the jobs I set most often — they are not the edge of the press.
- What is on the plate
-
Automation is a way of looking at work more than it is a category of software. Most useful jobs do not arrive with a name on them. They arrive as “every Thursday I export this, paste it into that, and fix the dates by hand”.
If you are not sure whether your thing is a job, it probably is. Describing it costs nothing and I will give you a straight answer, including the answer where you should not pay anyone to build it.
- Also possible
- Internal tools: small interfaces so a colleague can run the thing without you
- Reporting that assembles itself and arrives on a morning you choose
- Teaching: a day of pairing so your team can maintain what I built
- Advice, in writing, on whether to build, buy or leave it alone
- What I do not take
- Native mobile apps
- Machine‑learning research
- Anything that needs someone awake at 4am
- Growth marketing, SEO guarantees, or numbers I cannot stand behind
- If it is one of those
- I would rather point you at somebody good than take the job and do it adequately.
- Next
- Fill in the docket ↓
Open a job ticket
No obligation · a straight answer either wayTell me the boring thing. You do not need to know how it should be built — that is the part I am for.