Normally I'm a software engineer for my day job. It's a pretty normal affair, I clock in at around 9:30 or so, attend meetings and write code and troubleshoot issues and listen to podcasts and then I clock out at 5:30-6pm. The salary is good, the benefits are decent, and all in all it's quite stable.

Tomorrow I'll be doing something outside of my wheelhouse. I'll be doing a side gig.

Normally when we hear of side gigs we think of delivery work or menial labour. For me, I'll be helping a friend assess the suitability of a company acquisition! To be honest, since I've never done this sort of thing before I'm quite nervous. There is a lot of money at stake and my word is trusted enough to be the go/no go for this transaction.

I should negotiate my fee for this.

I've been in the industry for over a decade and I've been part of several small startups and a couple megacorps. I've seen what causes a company to fail and what merely slows it down on the way to success, and I'm hoping that this experience will translate well for tomorrow. I certainly have the trauma and the grey hairs (I'm in my early 30s) as hallmarks of my ordeal.

The main things that I'm going to be looking for will be:

• Operational health - how much is being built in terms of features, and how much work is spent on upkeep or issues?
• Scalability - What are the current bottlenecks, and how will things break if the site received 10x traffic?
• Costs - How is this being hosted? What are the data costs? What is the team size?
• Expandability - If the company were to expand their current product, what would the effort of work be to maintain it?

I can't list the company publicly, and my meeting is in the morning!