Cold Start

Forward deployed work is judged on how fast you ship inside a domain you did not know last month. So I measured it. Every row below is the time from my first commit in a new domain to the first production release, recorded as I worked rather than reconstructed afterwards. One row is measured between different endpoints and says which. Where a start cannot be measured, the row says so.

First commit in a new domain to the first production release. Days are calendar days between my first commit and the release. On the six measured rows, commit and release counts are my own contribution record: they describe what I shipped rather than the size of anyone's codebase. The EVERYANGLE row is marked as Approximate, describing what was owned rather than anything counted. Two rows carry test-file counts, Handee and Slipway, because I sole-authored both codebases; test files in each are tracked files matching test_*.py, *_test.py, *.test.* or *.spec.*, with conftest.py excluded because it holds fixtures rather than tests. The Slipway figure includes a pgTAP suite that the case study counts separately from its 79 Vitest files. The Slipway row is the one measured between different endpoints: prototype review to the release the crew installed, with its first commit five weeks earlier, on 29 July 2026.
Domain Organisation Prior Experience To Production Scale Reached
Procurement data capture tendr None 57 days Nov 25 - Jan 26 180 commits, 9 releases
Cloud infrastructure tendr EVERYANGLE 4 days Jan 26 177 commits, 39 releases
Procurement SaaS tendr None 100 days Nov 25 - Mar 26 639 commits, 26 releases
AI inference engine tendr None 9 days Mar 26 268 commits, 19 releases in 43 days
Facilities compliance Handee None 24 days May - Jun 26 848 commits, 34 releases, 552 test files
Fire personnel crewing Slipway Retained firefighter 13 days 23 Aug - 5 Sep 26 121 commits, 48 releases, 80 test files
Retail computer vision EVERYANGLE None 6-year tenure Approximate: ~120 repositories, 25+ microservices, multi-cloud
EU-funded education FIP None Not measurable Four-week contract, Aug to Sep 26. Every release tag is the client's

Reading the record

Four of the six measured starts shipped within 24 days, and none took longer than 100. Four of the six domains I had not worked in. Two rows are marked prior-experience because the same day count on familiar ground is not the same claim: the tendr infrastructure row, and Slipway, which is built for a service I serve in myself. Two of the four sub-24-day starts were cold. The two unmeasurable rows stay on the record because removing them would make the record look better than it is. How the days were spent, and the harness the work runs on, is written up under Method.

See the work