How I Focus on Your Results

Understand Your Issues

I start every project by getting to know your team and the unique challenges you're working on.

Develop a Plan

I'll work with you to come up with an efficient path to the results you're looking for.

Just Enough Code

I pride myself on writing as little code as possible to get the job done, being thoughtful but efficient.

One or two week sprints ensure we never lose sight of your goals.

Trusted by Top Companies

You're in good company. Some of the many brands I've worked with over the years.

“Hartley considered and covered small (but crucial) details in the project that would have otherwise gone unnoticed, and was so thorough that the majority of our QA time wasn't for bugs or errors, but my own changes. Hartley is considerate, detailed, and incredibly good at what he does. If you hire him, be assured that he'll cover all of your intended bases!”

Bryn Adler Localytics

“The difference between Hartley and the previous developers I have worked with is night and day. Hartley was incredibly thorough and communicative. He kept me up to date on his progress with weekly check ins that never left me wondering where we were on the project. His spec sheet was also incredibly helpful in bringing my vision to fruition. Hartley finished this project on time and on budget. He exceeded my expectations and I would definitely work with him again.”

Mike Stratman Serial Entrepreneur

“Hartley can ideate with the best of them, but then, there's no shortage of great ideas in the world; as I see it, where Hartley sets himself apart is (in large part, anyway) his ability to take ideas, find the path forward, and make things happen—fast (but thoughtfully!). His ambition is matched by skills and drive.”

Toph Tucker Bloomberg Businessweek

“After researching developers having skills in a very specialized area of expertise, I approached Hartley with only a concept. During our initial consult, in just a matter of minutes it all came to life. His natural business sense and grasp of unfamiliar subject matter in such a short period of time were simply phenomenal. And he asked all the right questions. Needless to say, I was extremely impressed. Admittedly, I was a bit hesitant in sending upfront payment to somebody I had neither met in person nor worked with before. But he was quite reasonable on contract terms, extremely professional throughout, and in the end it proved to be an excellent decision/experience.

What soon followed were a series of insightful emails and phone calls, again showing Hartley's brilliant entrepreneurial mind at work. Despite having limited prior experience with the specialized subject matter involved, he became fully-immersed, suggesting and then adding several key features. In just two weeks, Hartley delivered a flawless finished product, on time and on budget. Functionality was totally on point with a simple, straightforward interface and refreshingly-easy implementation. In short, Hartley created a very elegant solution, and I'm looking forward to working with him on other projects in the future.”

William Goldman President & Owner at 14K Music

Client Highlights

A closer look at some of my recent engagements.

Staff Software Engineer

Feb 2024 – Present

Led data pipeline standardization across a team of 8 engineers and built scraping infrastructure processing millions of pages daily. Reduced deploy times from 30–45 minutes to under 30 seconds through Terraform refactoring. Pioneered AI-driven engineering workflows that compressed common development tasks from ~1 week to ~1 hour. Led monorepo migration with PR-based workflows that transformed team collaboration.

Data Engineering Contractor

May 2022 – May 2025 (3 years)

Built internal tools on the data engineering team at this Amazon-owned self-driving car company, working with both real-time streaming and batch processing across millions of events and several terabytes of data per day. Reduced end-to-end event processing time from several days to under 4 hours. Tapped to work on a cross-functional tiger team reporting directly to executives within a 1,000+ person engineering organization.

Founder & Developer

Aug 2021 – Oct 2024 (3 years, 2 months)

Built and sold two Shopify apps. One processed and visualized millions of orders with geographic analytics for presidential campaigns and major retailers. The other provided a store locator with bulk location management for brands and their site visitors.

Full Stack Engineering Contractor

Aug 2017 – Oct 2020 (3 years, 2 months)

Led development of the Fleet Dashboard product for enterprise customers with lidar-equipped vehicle fleets. Enabled real-time vehicle tracking, collision/incident/fatality (CIF) event review, and driver association based on shift schedules.

The Complete Contractor

I have experience at all levels of building an application, as well as bringing it to market.

Web Applications

I've been building web applications since 2008, when I started teaching myself PHP. I've built dozens of web applications for clients as well as several successful web applications on my own, and was the CTO of two startups by the age of 23.

I know how to build and host a web application or mobile application API backend -- and I know how to do it scalably and securely.

I've been teaching coding bootcamp classes with General Assembly since 2015. I've also been on tech panels and mentored junior developers both online and in-person.

Project Management

I'm a big believer in the lean approach to build software. The methods I've learned for specing out a minimum viable products (MVP) ensure that my projects are always finished on time, on budget.

I've learned that technical project managment is a soft skill that some clients don't realize they're missing until it's too late, so I bring it every time.

I can help establish best practices for everything from your team's git workflow to its security posture to make sure things always run smoothly.

Web Scraping

In 2012, I published a blog post documenting some web scraping lessons I learned. The post shot to the top of Hacker News and has since been viewed by over 500,000 people.

Since then, I've worked on dozens of scraping projects at various stage companies -- from simple data collection tools for small businesses all the way up through scalable scraping pipelines that ETL large volumes of data daily, mostly from amazon.com and other ecommerce retailers.

In 2013, I published my first book titled "The Ultimate Guide to Web Scraping" which has sold thousands of copies. In 2016, I launched Scrape This Site to be the internet's best resource for learning web scraping.

HIRE ME!