Aaron Francis
Software developer and database educator, co-founder of Try Hard Studios with Steve Tenuto, making video courses on SQLite, Postgres and MySQL for developers.
“Out of the hubris of my heart, I said, but I'm a software developer and you're a property tax company. I don't know if you can afford to hire me. And they're like, brother, we can afford to hire you. So, first learning, real businesses do have money. It's not just Silicon Valley.”
Mostly Technical · Laravel Ecosystem · October 2026
Francis was the first and only programmer at a Texas property tax firm, which he helped grow from 16,000 to 72,000 properties before leaving as COO. He calls it one of the most valuable experiences of his career, because the software only had to serve the business.
Transcript
One Aaron Francis.
Hey, look at that. I didn't go to school
…my brother-in-law's a programmer. That could probably help. And so I came in first on a contract basis and took their existing systems and made them more robust. Still Google Sheets, still Zoho. I just did a bunch of Google Sheets like app script, which is Google's like macro thing. And I made their processes way better. And then they were like, hey, why don't you come work for us full time? And out of the hubris of my heart, I said, but I'm a software developer and you're a property tax company. I don't know if you can afford to hire me. And they're like, brother, we can afford to hire you. So, first learning, real businesses do have money. It's not just Silicon Valley. Then I spent the next four years building internal software that we scaled from 16,000 to 72,000 properties under representation. I hired a couple of programmers. I left as the COO. So I moved all the way up to like running the company. And it was one of the most valuable learning experiences of my professional career. Because you see, like, you see what matters and what doesn't matter. Like…
You know what I mean? Well, that's always the best way to get a job, to be fair, but also, but like having some kind of connection, obviously. But yes, you have to get through now. There's whatever. That's a whole separate discussion of how you get in the door, right? So, okay, you got to get in…
how you get in the door. And second, like more, how do you even know that the window and blind company is out there slash needs help? You know what I mean? Like, they're not saying I need to hire a software developer. They're like, oh, our business is on fire. That's the thing where, how do you…
Well, I think that it's, I'm, I'm saying, even sort of a step farther than that. Not even just finding the company that's on fire, but I'm saying applying to jobs that are just explicitly manager jobs. Like, it's not even a programming job at all. There's no expectation of programming. It's like…
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