I’m presenting to you my new product - myself!
The Story Where It All Began
A few years ago, when I was working at an outstaffing company, we received an interesting request from a client. His team had been working on an application for a year, he had spent millions of $, and the work just couldn’t seem to finish. There was a pile of bugs, deadlines weren’t being met, and he wanted to understand: what’s going on, and how to fix it?
That’s how the idea was born: We charge the client a small amount (much less than hiring a tech lead), and I audit his team’s work and codebase to analyze as a third party, without bias, why the work isn’t going well.
What I Discovered
I spent several dozen hours thoroughly analyzing the codebase and change history, joining calls and talking to all team members one-on-one.
First, that project had an architectural problem. The person who started the project thought it was a demo and wasn’t even an Android developer. He was an iOS developer, so he didn’t use Compose, there was no architecture, he didn’t set up DI, didn’t modularize the application, knew nothing about how to work with Gradle, and did everything to make the app’s code look as much like Swift as possible.
The developers who came after didn’t know this was a long-term project (the first one showed a demo, the new ones got the demo code). They continued using the same patterns, not bringing anything new, and just wrote code the way it was originally laid out, thinking that’s how it was supposed to be. Moreover, the developer who started it all had already left, and they hadn’t found a replacement. Because of this, the codebase grew into a pile of barely-working spaghetti code on an outdated stack. The team essentially had no architect, no one to make decisions.
The Solution
After I conducted the audit, I made the client a document with a plan to solve the problems with priorities for the business, which he could give to the developers. There were different things: appoint a tech lead, add a technical stage to product design, Compose, set up DI, architecture, how to split into modules.
I formatted all of this in two languages - developers’ and business’. In retrospective, this was my first experience working as a product engineer - the person who is the bridge between the development team and the business, who translates developers’ language, for example, “Gradle configuration is slow,” or “the iOS-like view dsl sucks” into business language:
Developers are spending $5k of your money per month waiting for the code they need for work to load. Here’s how to fix it - will take 16 hours, will pay for itself in 30 days.
I estimate the final value of the document at ~100k$: it helped the client make key decisions and save budget, compressed all my experience into 10 pages, and contained instructions from A to Z on how to speed up development by ~2-3 times.
Why This Matters in the Age of AI
Very recently, after leaving my last job, I spent more than a week anxiously thinking about what to do in the age of AI, when code can be written much faster and cheaper. My value is no longer in that I can write code, even if the code I write is perfect (and it’s not).
But after 600 hours of working with AI, I understood where AI will have weak spots for many years to come: system design, architecture, and communication. A business owner can’t let AI make decisions without the technical context needed to understand the business as a whole, and a developer can’t give AI a task well without understanding the product strategy. I already saw this at my previous job, where we had a huge gap between QA, developers, and the product team, because all three spoke different languages, and there wasn’t a specific person who could organize communication and connect business requirements and technical details.
That’s how I came to the idea that I can be most useful in the age of AI through my expertise in application architecture, in system design, and thanks to my product orientation, since I’ve already made several products from A to Z myself.
My Ikigai
Working as such an expert and consultant falls in the center of my Ikigai diagram:
My entire childhood I spent tinkering first with Lego, then reflashing the ROM of my phone a hundred times and optimizing every little detail of it, then customizing a Linux distribution for 200 hours (I’m on Arch btw), and I still spend weekends & nights polishing my own architectural framework. Such work in architecture, analysis, and design of complex systems would be a dream for me.
I’ve heard the most positive feedback and praise in my life specifically about my expertise not only in development, but also in how I communicate my knowledge to other people. You can’t optimize a team’s work without teaching and communication. That’s why my experience as a university lecturer and internship program author comes in handy here.
Call to Action
If you’re a developer, and you’d like me to come, help you deal with problems at work, make your life as a developer better, teach you new technologies or how to work with AI, and save your business money, I ask you to share the link to my updated website nek12.dev with your management or team lead.
If you’re a business owner or CTO, I invite you to schedule a free 20-minute call, and I’ll tell you the three biggest levers for your business.