The script review caught our use of unquoted $* in a migration wrapper—embarrassing, but exactly why we hired them. I would have liked the workshop scheduled a week earlier, but the findings memo landed on time.
Client stories
Names and sectors are used with permission. Details are trimmed where NDAs require it.
Our open-source backup CLI needed a stable 1.0 flag set. Orbit Console argued us out of three redundant subcommands and wrote the compatibility table we still ship in the README.
Pairing sessions were dense; junior devs needed replay recordings to follow. Still, production deploy failures tied to wrong flags dropped noticeably in the month after handoff.
Case: Municipal data export tool
Constraint: Windows and Linux clerks ran the same Python CLI from USB sticks with uneven Python versions.
Work: Four-week engagement—simplified config file discovery, frozen requirements file, and explicit --version output for helpdesk tickets.
Outcome: Support calls about “wrong folder” exports fell from roughly twelve per month to three, per the client’s ticket tags. We did not stay on for phase two (packaged installer); they hired internally using our backlog.
Case: Hedge fund research scripts
Constraint: Analysts chained twenty Bash files with undocumented environment variables.
Work: Script library review plus two pairing days on a thin orchestrator CLI with subcommands per dataset.
Outcome: Onboarding time for new analysts dropped from “a few weeks of shadowing” to a documented afternoon checklist. Compliance still required their own sign-off on logging—we documented stderr patterns only.