About
Victor Pass
I'm Stephen Smithwick. Victor Pass is my company — one engineer, in Colorado Springs.
Background
Twenty years of building backends: distributed systems and infrastructure at Amazon and Snowflake, platform and principal engineering before that in Sydney. Kinesis, SageMaker, DynamoDB, and a long tail of things that had to stay up.
These days most of my attention is on local LLMs, agent tooling, and the unglamorous problem of getting the right context in front of a model.
Victor Pass is small on purpose. I'd rather take on focused jobs and do each one properly than build you something overly-complicated.
How I work
In the open, further upstream than is comfortable. Ideas get a page while they're still speculative, and when I abandon something I say so and leave the page up, because "I tried this and it didn't work" is more useful to the next person than silence.
My blog, CodeVantage, has nine years of this: forty-odd posts, most of them thinking out loud.
Working with me
I'm interested in problems, not leads.
If some part of your work is slow, manual, or held together by a spreadsheet nobody else wants to touch, I'd like to hear about it. No pitch attached, and I'm not going to try to sell you software on a first conversation. I'm local and happy to come to you.
How it usually starts
- Email me about the problem. A few sentences is enough.
- We talk, in person if you're local. No charge, and no pitch.
- If there's something worth building, I'll suggest a small first step before anything bigger.
Contact
New work:[email protected]
Everything else:[email protected]