Work With Me

Skip the blank page

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 use the form above, and 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.

There are two ways to work with me, and you choose the level of access you're comfortable with.

• Reliability Review: read-only. I analyze your configuration, pipelines, and validation and report where they will fail, without touching or changing anything. The right starting point if you want to know your weak spots without anyone going near production.
• Validation & Guardrails: hands-on. Everything in the Review, plus the build: guardrails that reject invalid configuration and data before your system runs. I work in a 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 an engagement runs, step by step:

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 tier only). With your written sign-off, in a 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 severity, likelihood, and blast radius, 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 and an optional retainer to keep them current.

What the report actually looks like. Here's a complete example you can open and read. It's built on a fictional system, so no real client data appears in it, and it shows the structure, depth, and plain-language tone of a real deliverable.

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