Sheet 05, about
I lead the work, and bring in a crew for the crafts it needs.
ShirePath is me, Conner Contreras, building software in Columbia, Tennessee, with a small crew of specialists I trust. I take the first conversation, write most of the code, and own the ship date and everything after it.
The long version
ShirePath started in 2025, but the work started long before that. I have built software professionally for years, in C# and .NET, React, TypeScript, Next.js, and Python, across workers' comp brokerage, donor data pipelines, and youth sports operations. Somewhere along the way I noticed the pattern: I keep ending up as the person who looks at a broken system and says I will just build something better.
So that is what ShirePath does. I operate a youth flag football league, so I built the platform that runs it. I wanted Bible reading to feel like a game, so I built that. The same care goes into client work: a grant pipeline for an adoption nonprofit, a booking site for a stunt team, a quote form for a mobile detailer.
I am not trying to build the next unicorn. I am trying to build things that matter to the people who use them, and to tell the truth about all of it, including what I shelved.
When I am not building software, I am leading F3 workouts at 5am, restoring a 1985 GMC K2500 square body, cooking whatever the smoker asks for, and learning to be a good dad to my daughter alongside my wife Erin.
The crew
People I bring in when a job calls for their craft, credited on every sheet they worked on, and only with their say-so.
Patrick Taylor
AI and cloud infrastructure
Lives on the cutting edge of what models and agents can do, and is generous about dragging the rest of us along. He builds the cloud infrastructure underneath it too. If it involves models, prompts, or agents, I have probably run it by Patrick first.
- Advantage Sports: The AWS side: the schedule solver's tasks, PDF exports, and the move off Google Cloud
- Journey to Jericho: Led the build: the architecture, the AWS infrastructure, the Rails API and admin, and releases
Toby Chappell
Data
One of my best friends, and the person I call when the data layer stops making sense. He makes the pipes quiet so everything else can be loud.
- Advantage Sports: Reworked the payment code
Cole V. Hambright
Partner, Jettison Air
My partner on Jettison Air, and another friend I have known forever, which is the only way I know how to start a company.
- Jettison Air: Partner: the pricing model
- Cornerbell: Wrote most of Top Tenn, the platform Cornerbell started from
Paul Trotter
UI and UX design
The person I bring in when an interface needs a designer's eye: how a screen reads, where a person gets stuck, what to take away. We have not shipped a project together yet; when we do, it will be credited here.
How a job runs
Four stages, the same for a one-page site and a platform. You talk to me at every one of them.
First conversation
You tell me what keeps breaking or the idea you have, and what done would look like. I tell you plainly whether I am the right person for it.
A written plan
What gets built, in what order, on what it runs, and what it costs to keep running. Small enough to read in one sitting.
The build
I write most of it. Where a job needs a craft I do not practice every day, someone from the crew does that part, and you know who.
Shipping, and after
It goes live on infrastructure you own, with the runbook written down. I stay on the hook for what I built.
Before ShirePath
The work that taught me how to do this one.
| When | Where | What |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 on | Integrations engineeringFull time | Moving data between systems that were never meant to talk, full time. Glorified plumbing, and I love it. |
| 2018 on | Advantage Flag LeagueYorba Linda, California | I operate the league, and I built the platform that runs it. About 1,500 families a season. |
| Ongoing | Donor data pipelinesContract | Extract, transform, and load work that people's missions depend on. |
| Earlier | C#, .NET, and Blazor shopsVarious | Where I learned that architecture is a feature, and that "we'll refactor later" rarely happens. |