"I’m not sure if this is professional or not. It’s very self motivated and ruthlessly lazy, but also requires experience in knowing what will be a pain later down the line." James sounds like he's being entirely professional to me; this is a good post about maintaining services in your spare time, amongst other things.

"A service involving 8,500 GPS enabled busses and many servers is very impressive, but it really comes into it’s own when it doesn’t show off." Modest devices again. (This is very nice).