The Paid Pilot: Price a Low-Risk First Step
Free pilots attract tire-kickers. The paid pilot: 2-4 weeks, fixed price, one real workflow. How to structure, price, and proposal-template it.
Read article → FDE FundamentalsThe 9 Skills That Actually Make a Great FDE
Coding is table stakes. The 9 skills that actually make a great FDE: stakeholder translation, ruthless scoping, and seven more nobody puts in the JD.
Read article → Case Studies & StoriesReplacing a $2k/Month CRM in Two Weeks
A 12-person sales team used 4 of their CRM's 200 features. The two-week custom build that replaced it: the cost, the savings, and when not to try it.
Read article → Tools & StackStreamlit Dashboards: Ugly, Fast, Effective
A weekend-built Python dashboard beat a six-week React quote. When Streamlit is the right call for internal tools, and when it's malpractice.
Read article → Prototyping & DeliveryWizard of Oz Prototyping: Fake It, Then Build It
Put a human behind a real interface to validate the workflow before paying for the automation. The wizard of oz playbook.
Read article → AI & DataStructured Outputs: The LLM Feature That Matters
How schema-constrained decoding turned LLMs from chat toys into pipeline parts, plus the schema design rules that survive production.
Read article → Industry PlaybooksThe Original FDE Habitat: Government
Government invented the forward deployed engineer. What public sector FDE work looks like now, and what everyone can steal from it.
Read article → Hiring & CareersGoing Independent: The Freelance FDE Playbook
Landing your first three clients, pricing embedded work, surviving pipeline gaps, and knowing when to stop: the solo FDE playbook.
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