whoami

About

I'm Elmer Botha. Twenty-two years building and running production software — cloud architecture, backend systems, and the infrastructure underneath both. Most of that time spent designing systems on AWS and being accountable for them once they were live.

definitionOfDone.dev is deliberately one person. Not a stepping stone to an agency — an alternative to one. Agency pricing carries account management, coordination layers, bench time and premises. On a defined, well-specified build, that overhead buys you very little and costs you most of the invoice.

I take one engagement at a time, at a defined weekly capacity, and I turn down work that doesn't fit that shape. If your project needs a team, you should hire a team — and I'll tell you so.

The reason a single engineer can now deliver what recently took several is not that I work harder than everyone else. It's that the tools changed, and two decades of production scar tissue is what makes using them properly different from using them recklessly. That argument, in full, is on its own page.

skills.tstype-checked

        const strong = [
          "AWS architecture — serverless and event-driven systems",
          "API design, authorization and access control",
          "data modelling — relational and NoSQL, chosen deliberately",
          "infrastructure as code",
        ];
         
        const notMe = [
          "visual design",
          "security auditing",
          "network architecture",
          "native mobile",
        ]; // I build to a design file; I don't originate one.
        // for the rest, you want a specialist — I'll say so rather than take the work.
      

Does your project fit that shape?

$ talk-to-me