James Munns

Attempting to write a blurb for my consulting website, since I have some availability in about a month.

Trying to write ad copy for yourself sucks ass. Especially when the executive summary is "Hello hire me so I can help you make Cool Shit, or unfuck your existing shit so it can realize its latent Cool Shit Potential".

if you need help Building or Unfucking some Cool Shit.

I specialize in Rust, Embedded Systems, and Rapid Prototyping (building the Right Cool Shit for Right Now, very quickly).

I will offer you an unspecified discount if you contact me and have a cohost account older than this post.

tbh I used to use Twitter to "promote myself", mostly just building stuff and talking about it, which was enough for people to find me. It'd be real neat if I could use that for Cohost too.

I follow a lot of tags, but lately I feel like I haven't seen very many posts out there for the kinds of things I'm interested in. Cohost is a nice place, but I feel like I haven't found my "scene" at all (or maybe it just doesn't live here, sadly).

If y'all have any cool folks or tags to follow, feel free to share them with me. I'd love to have more of this stuff on my feed.

US daylight savings is today (March 12th). EU daylight savings is two weeks from now (26. March).

If you happen to have meetings with international folks, they will be wrong and everyone will be confused and late/early for the next week or two. Plan accordingly, be kind if someone no-shows.

Don't debate the concept of daylight savings in my replies please, like it or not it's happening nowish.

Even from small vendors, people will be like "psh, $50/100/200/300/400/500 for THAT?, someone could make that from an ESP32 and (whatever 1-5 additional primary components)".

And yeah. You might be able to buy the PARTS for that much. Or half that much! Or less!

Usually the "cost of parts", known as the "Bill of Materials", is generally SUPPOSED to be less than 1/3 of the retail price. But the thing is, if someone is selling it to you (I'm not even counting kickstarter shit!), you can buy it NOW. And it will Work.

The rest of the money? It goes to crazy overhead, like "paying the people who designed it", and "making it do cool new stuff in the future", and "making it legal to sell to people", and "replacing your device if it shits the bed".

Like, it's no wonder we don't have random, cool, niche products. They will inevitably be:

• Shit on by people who weren't going to buy it anyway
• Cloned and copied, because duplicating a working system is easier than coming up with it in the first place.

See cool new things for sale that didn't exist before? Buy them! Or don't! Just don't devalue other people's work. It's a bad look. People building cool shit are not generally trying to scam you, they are trying to actually make a living. Most of them don't, and go out of business, making something they really cared about.