How am I suppose to sell you if you cannot sell yourself?
This single comment should be one that all consultants should understand. There is a major difference between being a Consultant and a Contractor beyond just billing hourly.
What is a Consultant
A consultant is not just a coder. A consultant must - well consult. You pay a premium for consulting. This requires a consultant to have people skills as well as technical skills. From what I’ve seen, people skills are often much harder to teach then technical skills. Being a developer does take a specialized way of logical thinking and understanding multiple layers of abstractions. A consultant can take that abstracted system and translate it from technical expertise into business value.
Developer mindset
We have to be aware that consultants do not fall into a “developer” mindset. If a consultant is being used a what some could refer to as a “code monkey” then a business would be better off hiring out to a technical contracting firm. The rates will most likely be cheaper but the business is not using everything that it is paying for in a consultant in this circumstance.
Why does this matter?
When it comes down to it - a great consultant should be providing greater business value. At the same time, a consultant should also be lifting up those around him/her. Make the team better, make the project better, make the business better.
In order to do this, I’m going to try to embark and major issues that I’ve come across and document them here. I’ve dove head first into Cloud Native and the 12 factor app. Professionally, I’ve done centralized configuration management and service discovery on a global platform with 40+ microservices. Yet the knowledge I’ve gained is often times regulated to myself and/or my teammates. So here I am - building out a static site with Hugo, hosted on Google Cloud Storage, stored in Github and writing about the trials and tribulations of a modern cloud native professional. Hopefully, someone will gain some knowledge from my personal ramblings on problems I’ve faced on my push to the cloud.