Fast horses,
deep water,
incredible
technology.
The Pony Express crossed a continent in ten days; packet boats carried the mail the rest of the way down to the Black River; Fivemile was founded in Sacramento, CA and followed the trail to Jonesville, LA — all three found success for one reason: the handoff was clean.
Fivemile is a one-person practice — development, consulting and AI work for founders, product leads and agencies. I take the whole leg: questions, architecture, code, handover. And I plan my own exit from the first week.
Build
Applications, services and data plumbing that carry real load.
Advise
Architecture, due diligence, build-or-buy — days, not months.
AI
The version that survives real users, real data and a real budget.
Lagniappe
a little something extra
The software built under this name because it ought to exist.
John Halbert
A career inside other people's companies, where the interesting part was rarely the code. Offered directly now — one engagement at a time, declined honestly when the fit is wrong.
You will not be handed to anyone else. The person who scopes the work writes the code and signs the handover.
Read the water
A week of questions before a line of code. Every brief describes a symptom; the job is finding what it is a symptom of.
Set the course
One page: what we build, what we deliberately do not, and the test for arrival. You approve that, not a chart.
Make the run
Working software every week, in your repository, with the reasoning written beside it. Nothing revealed at the end.
Hand off the freight
Documentation your team can act on and a codebase that does not need me. The relay only works because the rider lets go.
Sacramento was the western end of the Pony Express, and the road the riders took east was measured in houses — Five Mile House, Eight Mile House, on up to Sportsman's Hall. At each one a spent horse was swapped for a fresh one and the mail went on without the rider.
It kept changing hands at the far end, too. Ten days later the mochila reached St. Joseph, Missouri, went by rail to Hannibal on the Mississippi, and anything bound for Louisiana went aboard a packet boat: downriver, up the Red, then into the Black — the run the mail packet Homer was working out of New Orleans in 1860.
Formed in the Sacramento area in 2018. The practice now works from Jonesville, Louisiana — the old Trinity landing, where the Ouachita, Tensas and Little meet to make the Black. A landing instead of a relay house, doing the same job.
The next boat
is loading.
john@fivemile.software
One paragraph about the problem is plenty. Taking new work from September, one project at a time. Replies come from me.
New dispatches are irregular — roughly monthly, when there's something worth the paper.