Kendall Digital Services
When I left my position at MB&G in 2019, I was determined to pursue my own project (This would become SharedSaga) but I also saw no reason to throw away the mutually beneficial business relationships that I had developed there. I was the expert on various pieces of software that I had been assigned to program during my years working for the consultancy. I formed an LLC called Kendall Digital Services in order to serve as a subcontractor for some of my old employer's contracts. This provided me with an income stream while I pursued my start-up idea and traveled with my new wife to visit family and advance the family archival idea that I was working on.
Also during this time a friend of mine founded a non-profit called Applied Community Ecology (ACE) which was focused on mobilizing local action to implement conservation efforts in nature spaces in his community. ACE needed a website and so I volunteered to create one for them. The website provides information about the conservation efforts that they manage and the non-profit's board members as well as accepting donations. It's a simple page but it has served their needs with minimal need for maintenance for years now.
Another opportunity came to me through my coding LLC was working on a ski insurance NextJS application for a Austrian recreation insurancer. I found this job by making a connection online to an entrepreneur who described the application's stack and it happened to be largely a match for my own start-up's tech. I did part-time off hours programming on the application in several stints for a couple years. The first assignment was to replace the payment system used in the application and then, later I added a new type of insurance offering to the app. One of the biggest challenges that I faced working on the project was the fact that the interface is entirely in German (which I do not speak) although the application files were mostly in English. Another challenging aspect of the work was the fact that the application was quite built out by a previous programmer and my goal was always to understand its inner workings just enough to accomplish the task at hand, but also to always limit my hours as much as possible for a client who wanted to keep things cheap. I'm proud to say that I was always able to get the work done and when I decided to stop working on the project the client relationship remained intact. They were sorry to see me go!
