This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.

We started with Thomas Smith joining from his truck — peaceful, quiet, and ready to talk shop. That led straight into a deep dive on why shell scripts break developers’ brains, the difference between command languages and programming languages, and why determinism in infrastructure is mostly a myth.

From there, Michael Payne walked through turning a dev contract into a local fractional CTO role, and the pros and cons of offering small-town IT services as a lead-in to higher-value fractional work.

We got into:

• compliance by checkbox (and why nobody cares until a big client forces it)
• brittle automation and why error handling in Bash matters
• command language vs programming language in DevOps and infra
• deterministic builds, golden images, and why reality always drifts
• local business IT as lead-gen vs distraction
• Rotary Club networking as a fractional growth tactic
• AI as context engine and trust gap filler for non-technical clients

No slides. No pitches. No agenda. Just honest conversation.

📅 Recorded August 4, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick

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