rent-the-toby.com
I had a year of sabbatical and extended it up until "I find the job that really hooks me". Turns out: I needed to create this job myself.
Since the beginning of this year I've been thinking more intensively about what I actually want to do, what I enjoy, and what moved me forward the past ~25 years of my work life. The answer surprised me — because it had been right under my nose the entire time.
It all started in 2003, when Deutsche Bank refused to pay me a ticket for my 2nd International PHP Conference. So I had to propose a talk to be invited. And guess what, I enjoyed it a lot. Every IPC thereafter had multiple talks and typically a workshop from me.
A year later, I finished my apprenticeship. Every other IT-specialist-to-be (specializing in software engineering) did a programming project for their final exam. But I didn't. I created a 3-day PHP beginners' training that was officially listed in the Deutsche Bank training catalog and held it in front of 12 software engineers.
Leaping forward, I gave more than 100 conference talks — what a blast! I wrote a book. I went on to found a PHP software quality consulting company and coached over a hundred software engineering teams to craft better web applications. Even during my time at Frontastic (as a co-founder and their principal software engineer), my biggest passion and impact was mentoring my engineers, supporting them with architectural guidance and moving critical projects into the right direction.
The conclusion hit me like a shock: It took me over a year of self-reflection to finally understand that the common denominator of everything I've done professionally is making the people around me better. Analyzing their software engineering challenges & pushing them in the right direction. Mentoring & teaching. Connecting people. That's what I'm really good at. And that's the job I was looking for.
Carlos, one of the engineers I hired at Frontastic early on, is now in a staff role. He put it better than I could:
Toby invested in me for years. He pushed back when I needed pushing, jumped in when I was genuinely stuck, and most of the time gave me the directions I need to figure it out myself. A lot of what I bring to my staff role today started in those conversations.
Now I'm making this official: rent-the-toby.com is live and you can use it to book me. I'll happily help you better understand and solve your software architecture & quality issues. I would love to mentor your senior / staff engineers to move towards principal level. And I can help you forward with agentic engineering, from my own practice and a large network of engineers and companies.
If you worked with me in the past, learned something from it and enjoyed it: please spread the word and recommend me to anyone who might need my services.
