During 2023 I have done various freelance Software Engineering projects for Nira Energy. Nira is a fantastic company in the clean energy space that computes available grid capacity at any substation in the regions they cover.

What this means is that developers interested in building new solar or wind plants can easily find the best places to do so by using Nira’s map to inspect the capacity of the grid (whether the grid can accept more power, and how much it will cost to link up to the existing grid) at locations they are considering.

Before Nira this was a painful manual process for each new development.

While working at Nira I got to learn about the external alternatives to the Google tech stack that I had worked in for most of my career.

This has been hugely valuable, because as a developer at Google you never use Git, VS Code, Slack or any other commonly used tools, which then makes you feel like a floundering baby developer when you emerge into the real world and try to be useful.

I’m very grateful that the folks at Nira were patient enough to let me get to grips with:

Git, Hasura, CircleCI, Retool, ArcGIS, VS Code, Slack, Notion, Loom

and various other critical startup tools.