I'm a full-stack developer and OSS maintainer, primarily focused on generating SDKs from OpenAPI specifications, building custom e-commerce integrations (Amazon, eBay, Shopify, etc), and modern PHP/Laravel development.
I've built dozens of one-off e-commerce integrations – everything from multi-platform inventory management systems to analytics dashboards to cross-border e-commerce tax compliance software.
I built and maintain the largest Selling Partner API SDK [0], which has 3.8M downloads and counting, alongside a number of other OSS e-commerce API tools [1], and custom tooling for generating SDKs from OpenAPI specifications.
I also have experience with several major web stacks (PHP/Laravel, Python/Django, JavaScript/Next, etc).
Much of my work the past few years has been working with Amazon's seller-side e-commerce APIs, and it's truly infuriating how impenetrable their "support" systems are. It's ridiculously hard to get even basic problems solved, and for some reason they make it near-impossible to get access to shipping and tax addresses via their APIs [0], which makes developing pretty basic functionality really difficult.
I rode through a huge area filled with these sorts of walls somewhere wayyy down a dirt road in rural central Mexico, sorta near Zacatecas. It looked like it was once a vineyard, or something like that...I'd never seen walls that looked this way before. Really beautiful. I had no idea that it was originally a European thing.
Are you integrating with an ecommerce APIs and encountering lots of confusing behavior? Poor documentation? Really slow developer support? At Highside we have run into these issues many times before -- we learned the gotchas, so you don't have to.
We've integrated with Amazon's Selling Partner API (I wrote the top PHP library for it [0]), Walmart's Marketplace APIs, eBay's old Trading API and newer REST APIs, Shopify's REST and GraphQL offerings, and more.
As a two-person consulting shop, we are fast-moving, flexible, and can easily accommodate the inevitable scope changes that come with developing multi-marketplace solutions.
(While ecommerce APIs are our specialty, they're not all we do -- we have done everything from full-stack webapps to web3 projects to real-world lighting control systems.)
Get in touch with us at hi@highsidelabs.co or jesse@jesseevers.com (my personal email).
Are you integrating with an ecommerce APIs and encountering lots of confusing behavior? Poor documentation? Really slow developer support? At Highside we have run into these issues many times before -- we learned the gotchas, so you don't have to.
We've integrated with Amazon's Selling Partner API (I wrote the top PHP library for it [0]), Walmart's Marketplace APIs, eBay's old Trading API and newer REST APIs, Shopify's REST and GraphQL offerings, and more.
As a two-person shop, we are fast-moving, flexible, and can easily accommodate the inevitable scope changes that come with developing multi-marketplace solutions.
(While ecommerce APIs are our specialty, they're not all we do -- we have done everything from full-stack webapps to web3 projects to real-world lighting control systems.)
Get in touch with us at hi@highsidelabs.co or jesse@jesseevers.com (my personal email).
disclaimer: i've only been doing this for a couple years...but it's gone pretty well. i've written this more like a story than direct advice, because i think all the twists and turns are relevant.
i went straight from college (dropout) into the consulting world right before COVID hit. i gave myself a year to get the consulting business going, and if that didn't work, i was planning to get a "real job."
i started off by leveraging my existing contacts in the software world: mostly a couple internships that I'd had (one before my year of college, one after). the first few months, i was only working for those two places while i tried to figure out how to expand. i started a blog [0] at this point -- it was mostly nontechnical content, but helped me demonstrate that i'm a sane person and a reasonably good communicator.
i started replying to the "Who wants to be hired?" threads here on HN and got my first couple (small) independent contracts there. then a family friend who runs a high-volume used book business needed his whole inventory/order management system redone from scratch, and i was a) cheaper and b) a known quantity, so he hired me. you can interpret this as me getting lucky, and in some sense it is, but i strongly believe that luck favors the prepared. i certainly wouldn't have gotten that gig if i hadn't been prepping for it, hard. this is when i started to raise my rates.
(you've probably seen this repeated endlessly on HN, but it bears repeating: raise your rates. raise your rates. and then raise them again. to match $XX/hr as a FTE, you need to charge at least 2*$XX/hr as a consultant. ideally a lot more.)
i spent tons of time reading HN and twitter, and responding to anyone who was doing something i found interesting. i went into these interactions with no expectation of getting work out of it -- i just wanted to meet people who were working on cool things. a few of those interactions did turn into work, and one person i met is now one of my best IRL friends. crazy.
at some point, i had to learn about a new amazon service (the Selling Partner API) for that bookstore project, and discovered just how badly documented and tested it was. after a couple months (!!) figuring out how to use it properly, i wrote a few blog posts about it, and people started hiring me from my blog (and now, my OSS SP API library [1]). between that, and a few of those people i talked about meeting via HN/twitter/etc, i've kept busy for the past 18 months. i actually just hired my first part-time employee, which is exciting :)
i think the three biggest things that have made me a modestly successful consultant are:
1. focusing on people over everything else. if you're a consultant, you're a salesperson, and in my experience just being genuinely interested in other people is the easiest and most effective form of sales.
2. writing online. it's cliched, but it works. you don't need that many people to see what you've written for it to be worth it -- i've never gotten more than 150 views in a day on my blog, and usually it's way less than that, but that's been enough to have plenty of work.
3. raising my prices ;)
i make a lot less money than i might by working for FAANG/etc, but i have total time and location freedom, i don't work a ton, and i really enjoy running my own show. ymmv, and good luck :)
That's so cool that you were part of the founding team for a makerspace! I'm working on building something makerspace-y right now...If you're open to it, I'd love to ask you a couple quick questions about it. If you're busy, no worries, I 100% get it :) my email is in my bio.
Well, it's not programming-related, but here goes...
I'm building a cooperative hands-on workspace in Brooklyn in an old warehouse. I have lots of interests that require space and tooling (old motorcycles/cars, woodworking, etc), and lots of friends in a similar boat (with fabrication, music, art, etc). I spent the last 6-8 months searching for a suitable space that I could actually afford, and finally found one about a month ago.
I'm in the process of gutting most of it (it's in gnarly condition) and rebuilding it to suit what I'm trying to do. If there's anyone here who lives in NYC, is good with their hands or wants to be, and is intrigued by the idea of getting a bunch of highly motivated and creative people together in one spot to build Cool Shit (whatever that may look like), feel free to get in touch.
Heck yeah mate! There's one or two of these here in SF (I'm currently working in the one I'm a member of) and glad to see others are opening up other options. Best of luck with everything going forward, I might reach out to check on your progress the next time I make one of my occasional trips to NYC.
I maintain a much, much smaller PHP library[0] (~1-2k downloads/month), and I've made a few thousand dollars in sponsorships, donations, and paid improvements to the library over the past year. I don't try all that hard to solicit donations, but I do have a donate button and a request for people to sponsor the library right near the top of the README. I noticed you don't have any visible donate button -- I'm guessing if you added one, and a little blurb about why people might want to donate, you'd up your donations quite a bit.
I built a PHP library[0] for Amazon's new Selling Partner API, because none of the existing libraries were feature-complete enough for the projects I was working on. To my surprise, it's actually picked up some steam -- ~400 installs (and lots of email/GitHub questions :) so far!
It's really fun having a tool that I created get some use.. I've benefitted a ton from the OSS community, so it's nice to be able to have that relationship go the other way, even in a small way. Plus, I've learned a lot about Swagger/OpenAPI, and the many quirks of Amazon's seller-facing software.
I'm a full-stack developer and OSS maintainer, primarily focused on generating SDKs from OpenAPI specifications, building custom e-commerce integrations (Amazon, eBay, Shopify, etc), and modern PHP/Laravel development.
I've built dozens of one-off e-commerce integrations – everything from multi-platform inventory management systems to analytics dashboards to cross-border e-commerce tax compliance software.
I built and maintain the largest Selling Partner API SDK [0], which has 3.8M downloads and counting, alongside a number of other OSS e-commerce API tools [1], and custom tooling for generating SDKs from OpenAPI specifications.
I also have experience with several major web stacks (PHP/Laravel, Python/Django, JavaScript/Next, etc).
My email is jesse [at] jesseevers [dot] com.
[0] https://github.com/jlevers/selling-partner-api [1] https://github.com/highsidelabs