🛹 Who are you?

Hey G'day,

I'm Christopher Talke Buscaino, I am a Self-taught Programmer, Lifelong Skateboarder, Videographer, Homelab Tinkerer, and Videogame Modder based out of Australia 🦘.

Professionally, I was a Sales Coordinator and Account Manager within the Managed Services ICT Industry for 6+ years; whilst I loved working with clients, building relationships, going through the pre-sales design phase, building out proposals, preparing supporting documentation; I never quite felt fulfilled, even when I occasionally got my hands on the tools (fixing stuff, racking servers etc).

However, during this time I had been super interested in programming, so I began teaching myself by taking every spare moment to read books, watch videos, read documentation, listen to podcasts, and... well... just programming. I mean legitimately every spare second I could find; I was throwing everything at this. After many years of hesitation, being racked with imposter syndrome, I made the choice to delve into the Software Development world and I can safely say I have found my place in the world as a Fullstack Software Developer.

Right now - I'm working in the E-Learning industry, helping businesses of all sizes solve problems associated to Training and Compliance; and again, putting any spare time I have to now slowly building my own independent tech consultation business. My mission is to help small business owners improve their business efficiency and productivity through custom software and automation solutions.

So that's who I am, where I came from, and what I do!

🏢 What are you working on right now?

I’m currently developing SwiftCPQ, an open-source, vendor-agnostic proposal tool designed to be an accessible alternative to proprietary solutions like ConnectWise CPQ (formerly ConnectWise Sell, formerly Quosal Sell), Kaseya Quote Manager (formerly Datto Commerce, formerly Gluh), and Scalepad Quoter (formerly Quoter). 😉

The inspiration for SwiftCPQ stems from my time as an Account Manager/Sales Coordinator, where I constantly struggled with the limitations/short comings/lacking extensability of existing tools for creating and configuring proposals.

To overcome these challenges, I often built custom solutions on top of these tools through unconventional techniques such as MITM script injection, reverse engineering undocumented APIs, and when I could leveraging; official SOAP/REST endpoints. All in the aims of speeding up the quoting process, reducing errors through custom review features, and developing integrations with other platforms in a way that actually made sense from a sales to technical/ sales to accounts handover perspective.

With my current situation; trying to build my own independent consultation business, there isn't a lot of revenue to play with, so it was not a smart choice to invest in products such as these. But I do have the skills now to build my own solutions to bootstrap where I can, and this is something I prototyped out of Christmas and got my first project approved with!

So, that's what I am working on, a tool built from the ground up to prioritize flexibility, accessibility, and extensibility, allowing me to tailor it to my workflow and assist with my quoting process.

Whilst also hopefully helping like-minded folk have access to such a tool, and create an opportunity for being to contribute/support the tool along the way.

💸 Cool, why should we sponsor you

Sponsoring me means your hard earned money will directly contribute to the development and enhancement of SwiftCPQ, helping to deliver features, and integrations. I'm intending to build this as an open source project so that businesses have access to the source code; can adapt it to their workflows and also contribute back to the project so everyone can benefit from the products improvement,

All of this without being locked into restrictive subscriptions or worrying about vendor acquisitions and rebrands. Now for those who prefer a managed solution, I will be offering hosting and management services, as a way for you to support the project should you wish to use it. If you later choose to move to a self-hosted solution, by all means, I'll help you get there.

With your support, and collaboration, I hope that together we can make a powerful pre-sales/sales tool accessible to everyone, for free.

Sound good?

🤨 Do I have to help you?

Absolutely not, but I would very much appreciate it. ❤️