My approach to freelance work

Doing freelance work for individuals is the best kind of work for several reasons: what individuals ask me to do is cooler than what companies would hire me for, they ask me to do things that are more up my alley, only one person needs to be happy with the result without needing to guess what would make them happy, and I don't need to worry about how to get the product sold.

I'd like to do more of that, and you can contact me to do so (e-mail at the bottom of this page), so let's look at how that works.

First example: GradientApplier

GradientApplier in action on a greyscale elevation map at 4x speed

In 2022 a Photosounder user asked me if I could create something for macOS to apply gradients to images for an art project he was working on. We had a back and forth by email discussing details until they were more or less settled, and I first made sure that this would work for him by asking him to test a small test program that would be technologically very similar to GradientApplier.

It was paid for in three steps, the first payment was for a usable but unfinished build, the second for the finished version, and a third payment for adding extra features. That's a very good way of proceeding that minimises risks and pressure for both parties. In total it cost $1,100 (in 2022 dollars).

Second example: a sound synchronisation algorithm

Of course my freelance work doesn't have to only be about creating entire programs, it can be just an algorithm.

In 2011 I was contacted by someone working on a video tool, and he needed an algorithm that finds how to synchronise audio recordings of the same scene from different microphones. A similar process as with GradientApplier ensued, we agreed on an initial feature set, I kept him updated and sending him development builds as development progressed, and when the initial goals were reached we agreed on more features.

The types of things I can do

For an entire program like GradientApplier the path of least resistance (and therefore of least cost) is something with a user interface just like GradientApplier with that exact style. Such an interface is GPU-accelerated through OpenCL/GL so it's very fluid and responsive. The whole interface is zoomable which can be a great way to visualise lots of data or deal with highly detailed images.

Let's list the type of things I can easily do so you can get an idea of what you can ask me to do:

• Standalone programs (Windows, macOS, Linux).
• VST3/CLAP/AudioUnit plugins.
• Image/sound/signal processing algorithms, antialiased rasterisation.
• Data visualisation tools (for instance I've made a WebAssembly binary visualiser, a CAN message visualiser, various compilation map/memory allocation visualisers).
• Other types of utilities, it could be pretty much anything.
• I like making calculators, so it could be something like that. I've made a graphing calculator, an image calculator and a drawing calculator, all center around typing in some formulas. Maybe I could make some kind of sound calculator.
• My code to deal with decoding/encoding videos is getting rather good so I can do a lot in the field of video.
• Anything with math, I'm really good at dealing with all sorts of arithmetics (fixed point, floating point, double-double, arbitrary precision) and I get a lot done with my advanced polynomial skills. Doing approximations of mathematical functions is one of my great specialities.

Contact me

If you have an idea just send me an email and we can talk about it, it's free.