Last year I quit my job to rebuild something from my past.
Jottit was a tool Aaron Swartz and I made in 2007, back when the web was small and personal and a little weird. You typed something, clicked a button, and had a page online. It disappeared years ago, and I always regretted that.
Aaron and I had met Paul Graham as part of Y Combinator's first batch in 2005, so I emailed him about bringing Jottit back. To my surprise he said yes to funding it. I spent the past months doing just that, and it's live now at jottit.org, rebuilt from scratch by me alone. In the same stretch I also shipped Tinypost, a simple newsletter tool with paid subscriptions and custom domains, open source.
That phase is wrapping up, and I'm looking for where to work next.
What I do
I'm a full-stack developer with 20 years of experience. I take an idea and turn it into something real that people use. My default stack these days is Python (Flask and FastAPI), Postgres, and Fly.io, but I've shipped on plenty of others over the years.
The through-line in everything I build is simplicity. I think most software is more complicated than it needs to be, and I've spent a long time learning to make it simpler. Simple software ships faster, breaks less, and is easier for the next person to work on. It's also, in my experience, harder to write than complicated software.
How I work
I live in rural Denmark and work fully remote and async. I've done it for years and I'm good at it: clear writing, small reliable increments, no one needing to look over my shoulder. I'm at home in small teams and comfortable being the only developer on a project.
What I'm looking for
Full-time roles or substantial freelance projects. I'm especially drawn to tools for writing and publishing, the open web, and products where a small team is trying to build something genuinely useful. If your company runs async and values people who ship, we'll probably get along.
Get in touch
If you're building something and need a developer, email me at me@simonbc.com. And if you know someone who is, I'd be grateful if you passed this along.
More about the Jottit rebuild: simonbc.com/rebuilding-jottit