Work With Me

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Going for the £200 Starter Reliability Review? You need none of what follows. There is no template to fill in and nothing to download. Just answer three questions in an email:

1. What keeps going wrong, and roughly how often?
2. Which piece of software, or which part of your setup, does it seem to involve?
3. What would “fixed” look like for you?

Rough answers are fine, and “I don't know” is a real answer to the second one: working that out is part of what you're paying for. Send them to baxterdoby@gmail.com or choose the Starter review in the form above, which asks these same three questions. You'll have a reply within one working day.

Thinking about a full Reliability Review or a Validation & Guardrails engagement? Those are worth scoping properly. Read the overview, fill in as much of the scope template as you know (rough is fine), and send it over, so we start from a shared picture of your system instead of an empty page.

1. Download the scope template and fill in what you can: the outcome you want, the systems and environments involved, and anything explicitly out of scope.
2. Email the completed template to baxterdoby@gmail.com, with your name in the subject line.
3. I'll review it and reply within a few days with a scoped plan and a quote. Nothing is committed until we've both signed it off.

Prefer to just say hello first? Use the form above, and the template can wait until we've talked.

What to expect

Before you commit to anything, here's exactly how an engagement runs and what you receive at the end.

Every tier is one of two kinds, so you choose the level of access you're comfortable with.

• Read-only: the Starter Reliability Review (£200) and the Reliability Review (from £900). I analyze your configuration, pipelines, and validation and report where they will fail, without touching or changing anything. The starter covers one slice; the full review goes through the rest in detail. The right starting point if you want to know your weak spots without anyone going near production.
• Hands-on: the First Fix (£450) and Validation & Guardrails (from £2,500). The First Fix closes one finding. Validation & Guardrails is everything in the Review, plus the build: guardrails that reject invalid configuration and data before your system runs. Either way, I work in a copy, branch or environment you control, only with your written sign-off, and confirm the guardrails catch known-bad inputs before handover. Your production environment is never touched.

How a full engagement runs, step by step. The starter review is the short version: three questions, one slice, and findings within 5 working days.

1. Scope. Over the template or a few emails, we agree the tier, the outcome, which systems are in scope, and what's explicitly out. You get a fixed quote before any work starts.
2. Review. A schema-driven, read-only pass over your config, pipelines, and validation in every environment, showing the gap between what the system is meant to do and what it does. It is the whole of a Reliability Review and the foundation of a Validation engagement.
3. Build (hands-on tiers only). With your written sign-off, in a copy, branch or environment you control, I add the guardrails that reject invalid states and confirm they catch known-bad inputs. Never without explicit agreement, and never against production.
4. Findings. A prioritized report, with every issue ranked by how serious it is, how likely it is, and how far the damage would spread, and each paired with the specific guardrail that stops it recurring, written so your own engineers can implement it.
5. Handover. The validation layers, CI checks, and reproduction steps land as a handover pack, with verification that the guardrails hold. If you'd like me to keep them current after that, that is Someone on Call.

What the report actually looks like. Two complete examples you can read now, both built on example businesses, so no real client data appears in either. The starter review's findings are a short note in plain English, for the owner. The full Reliability Review goes deeper and is written for a team with its own developers.

Illustrative examples only: a real report is scoped entirely to your system.

Doby Baxter Computing is based at Electric Works, opposite Sheffield station. See where I work →