Following the successful launch of my book Professional CMake: A Practical Guide last year and receiving positive feedback from readers, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve formed my own consulting company, Crascit Pty Ltd. An overview of the sort of consulting services I will be providing are available on the services page. The general intention though is to make myself available to clients to help them address their CMake, C++ and build/release challenges.

I’ve observed that many companies simply don’t have the in-house expertise to tackle build system issues on their own. In other cases, they have some expertise, but they don’t have the capacity to dedicate resources to fixing or improving builds. For either scenario, the whole team suffers as builds break, become unreliable and don’t utilize available resources efficiently. This translates into many lost hours, frustrating developers who could otherwise spend their time on more productive things than fixing build issues. I’d like to change that and give companies the opportunity to bring in the expertise needed to address these problems.

Setting up robust release processes is another area that companies sometimes struggle with. Producing release packages in the various formats expected across different platforms can be challenging. It requires understanding user expectations, packaging systems and the technical aspects of actually building the packages. Development teams frequently don’t have that expertise, but it is the sort of task that can often be carried out by an experienced, trusted consultant. The team can usually maintain a build and release process themselves once it has been set up, if done well. Getting that set up right in the first place though is often an insurmountable barrier. Again, I’d like to provide that service so that companies can deliver better quality release packages to their users.

These are just some of the ways I hope to be able to help companies with their C++ software projects. If you have a particular issue you’d like to discuss, don’t hesitate to get in touch for a confidential chat. You can also catch me at CppCon in a couple of weeks’ time, where I’ll be delivering a talk on Deep CMake For Library Authors.