+-----------------[ Erica Thompson's Tech Garden ]-------------------+
|                                                                    |
|     🌱 ~/code $ audit ./your-codebase --find-roots                 |
|     🪓 Clearing technical debt since 2013                          |
|     🌾 Advising founders since 2022                                |
|     🎓 Growing engineers who outgrow me                            |
|                                                                    |
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Erica Thompson | Fractional CTO & Technical Strategist

Clearing technical debt, scaling infrastructure, and passing due diligence.

You lead a startup or engineering team, and one of these is true:

• The Scaling Wall. Your codebase got you to launch, but it will shatter before Series A.
• The Due Diligence Threat. You are raising soon, and you need a clean technical bill of health before investors open the hood.
• The Leadership Gap. Your last technical lead left, and the architecture they left behind is a liability.
• The Budget Reality. You need senior, executive technical judgment, but you do not need a $250K full-time CTO.

Every one of these is the same problem in disguise: a technical decision that was reasonable when it was made, and is ruthlessly expensive now. That is the category I work in.

I know the operator side because I have lived it. I have made payroll, chased invoices, and had a business depend on whether the technology held. Technical decisions read differently once you have signed the checks behind them.

Most engineering problems presented to me are symptoms. 400 daily errors are usually 3 root causes. 200 accessibility violations are usually one missing component pattern. My work is finding the root cause before you spend a quarter on the wrong thing.

• 💰 $1.2M Generated. Rebuilt a B2B onboarding flow that directly drove $1.2M in annual revenue. (Wagmo)
• 🛡️ $12.5M Protected. Shipped critical regulatory compliance 10 days early, with zero disruption to 20K+ live policies. (Wagmo)
• ⚖️ $50K+ Legal Exposure Cleared. Remediated 200+ accessibility violations to 95% compliance under an active accessibility lawsuit, ahead of investor due diligence. (Wagmo)
• 🔍 60% Error Reduction. Traced 400+ daily routing failures to 3 systemic root causes on a platform serving 100K+ users. (HashiCorp)
• ⏱️ 70% Faster Incident Response. Architected observability that dropped incident response from 2+ hours to 36 minutes. (Skillz)
• 🤝 180+ Inbound Founder Requests. Portfolio companies have gone on to raise, pivot, and be acquired. (Independent advisory)

Companies compound through people. Engineers who are trusted, taught, and held to a clear standard become engineers who can take on any problem, including ones they have never seen. Grow the person. Grow the team. Grow the company.

• Failures belong to the system. Blameless reviews, real accountability: we own the fix, the follow-through, and the lesson. High standards, high support.
• Clarity is a leadership duty. Every engineer should know what matters most, why, and who decides.
• Standards are enforced by systems, not memory. Security, accessibility, and quality are checked on every change, so people spend their judgment on the hard problems.
• AI is accountable like any other system. AI amplifies whatever foundation it lands on. Every AI feature has an owner, measured quality, and rules it cannot break.

These rest on research, not opinion: psychological safety was the most important factor in Google's most effective teams (Project Aristotle), and DORA's research links trusting, learning cultures to both delivery and business performance.

Three ways teams bring me in. All three are designed so your team keeps the capability long after I leave.

Transparency Guarantee. Fixed fees, fixed scope, published rates. You know the number before the first call, and it does not move while I am inside your codebase.

I have trained more than 500 engineers into this industry. Career changers, veterans, military spouses, and people the traditional pipeline ignored. Over 80% of the engineers I mentor, one-on-one and in groups, have landed tech roles.

I put my methods on the record: how to read an unfamiliar codebase, how to debug like a detective, and how to translate what you built into what it earned. If you are a founder deciding whether to trust me with your system, start here. Watch how I think through a problem before you pay me to think through yours.

• Fractional CTO & Startup Specialist (2022 to Present). Technical counsel to CEOs and COOs. Technical due diligence, architecture review, interview boards, and team building. 180+ inbound founder requests.
• Software Engineer, HashiCorp [IBM] (2025 to 2026). Owned diagnosis at 100K+ scale. Unified fractured UI patterns across teams and served as Vault Release Captain.
• Senior Software Engineer, Wagmo (2022 to 2024). Owned revenue and regulatory risk. Drove compliance, accessibility, and B2B revenue wins. Led 3 platform migrations with zero business disruption.
• Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, Skillz (2021). Platform infrastructure for millions of tournament entries. Built Terraform and Go automation still running in production today.
• Junior to Lead Developer, and Founder of Brave Haven (2013 to 2019). Climbed the ladder, ran my own shop, and learned that technology only matters if it keeps the business alive.
• Instructor and Mentor (2019 to Present). Nashville Software School, We Who Code, Veterati. 500+ engineers trained.

🌾 Fractional CTO engagements and technical audits  ·  primary focus
🔍 Technical due diligence for investors and acquirers
🪑 Board and technical advisory seats
🎤 Workshops, training, and conference talks