whoami
👋 Hey, I'm Nathaniel James.
I write code, ship it to production, and tell you what actually happened — including the parts I'd redo. Most “best practices” content skips that part. I don't.
Field artillery to shipping production software for a decade — now building the next thing, in public.
Every week: what actually broke, what I built, what I'd do differently. Real code, real numbers, no theory.
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about
10 years shipping production software at mid-size companies and consulting firms taught me one thing: most tutorials and “best practices” posts are written by people who've never had to live with the code afterward. I have. That's what I write about.
Before that: 5 years in the Army, field artillery. Now I'm a married father of three building the next thing. None of that makes the code better — it's just who 's writing this.
I'll tell you when something's a bad idea, including my own decisions. Self-deprecating about the human parts — deadlines, ego, bad weekends. Not soft on the technical parts.
services
Pricing confirmed at booking — reach out for current rates.
building
Scope Panda
Free fillable client questionnaire templates — 23 of them, for freelance work. No account, nothing hosted.
Incident Context Copilot
Free Slack bot that keeps one pinned, always-current summary during an incident — hypothesis, actions taken, who's on it. Flags duplicate work before it wastes time.
writing
Latest posts go here once the feed is live — pull from X or a blog RSS.