Posts

A small app, two app stores, fourteen days

I’m a consultant. I shipped a mobile app to iOS and Android in two weeks. The code took three days. The paperwork took ten. The moat is not where you think it is.

Thursday, April 30, 2026 | 12 minutes Read

Constrained by Time, Not Ability

A friend pushed back on yesterday’s post. The framing made Claude the smart one and me the person pointing at things, and that isn’t true. Here’s the version I should have written.

Monday, April 27, 2026 | 3 minutes Read

Ten PRs Before Lunch, From My Phone

Two hours, ten merged PRs, no editor. Just a phone, Claude Code, and the prompting habits that turn the model from a coder into a release engineer.

Sunday, April 26, 2026 | 12 minutes Read

Agentic Coding Is the Consultant's Revolution

I’m a principal consultant, not a developer. I still ship software. Here’s what agentic coding looks like when the person driving it cares more about outcomes than about the code.

Sunday, April 19, 2026 | 7 minutes Read

Building Tour of the Bible: A 66-Book Reading Companion with No Backend

Why I built it Matt Whitman — the “Ten Minute Bible Hour” guy — wrote a short piece called the Lightning-Fast Field Guide to the Bible: 66 books, roughly 90 minutes, a couple of key passages per book to give you the taste without the full commitment. I loved the idea. I wanted a cleaner way to work through it than a physical checklist and a notes app, with the passages right there to tap on rather than switching to a Bible app and losing my place.

Sunday, April 12, 2026 | 3 minutes Read

Building Meeting Reminder: An ADHD-Focused Menu Bar App for macOS

The problem I lose track of time. Not in a cute “oh wow, 3pm already” way — in a “the meeting started 4 minutes ago and nobody’s in the room but me and confusion” way. Calendar notifications are too quiet. Slack DMs asking “you joining?” are too late. And the moment I’m deep in a document or a terminal, the rest of the world stops existing. I’d been using In Your Face for a while — a brilliant macOS app that throws a full-screen block in front of you before meetings. It’s excellent. But I wanted to tinker, I wanted something free and open source, and I wanted to layer in a few things specific to how my brain misses meetings.

Friday, April 10, 2026 | 3 minutes Read

Service Generator: Building a ProPresenter Playlist From a PDF Service Order

How Service Generator turns a Planning Center PDF into a fully-populated ProPresenter playlist in about two minutes — and the song-title fuzzy-matching problem that almost killed it.

Tuesday, March 24, 2026 | 6 minutes Read

Building UK Food Facts: From 'How Many Calories in a Sausage Roll' to 2,700 Meals

I spent 20 minutes trying to find the calories in a Greggs sausage roll and ended up building a whole app.

Friday, March 20, 2026 | 5 minutes Read

Building Azure Capacity Checker: Closing the Migration-Day Gap

Disclosure: I work for Altra, the company behind Dr. Migrate. This project reads Dr. Migrate rightsizing exports, so that’s worth naming up front. The tool itself is a personal side-project — opinions, bugs, and weekend commits are my own. The problem nobody tells you about until migration day You run a rightsizing exercise. You get a lovely Excel file with 1,200 servers each mapped to a neat Azure VM SKU. Sign-off happens. Change windows go in the calendar. Migration day arrives. And then you discover that the Standard_D4s_v5 you planned for 300 servers is allocated out in your target region — or worse, not available in that region at all, or not available on your subscription tier — and the whole plan wobbles.

Monday, March 2, 2026 | 3 minutes Read

Building the Azure Architecture Recommender: From Assessment Data to Ranked Patterns

Disclosure: I work for Altra, the company behind Dr. Migrate. This tool consumes Dr. Migrate assessment exports, which is worth flagging up front. The project is a personal side-project — opinions and weekend commits are my own. The question this tries to answer “We’ve assessed this application. What’s the right Azure architecture for it?” That question gets asked a hundred times a week across partners, account teams, and customers. The honest answer involves reading the assessment, understanding the app, skimming the Azure Architecture Center, and making a judgement call. The dishonest answer is “AKS” regardless of what the data says.

Saturday, February 14, 2026 | 3 minutes Read

Building ProPresenter Lyrics Export: Solving a Real Problem for Worship Teams

How a weekend frustration turned into a cross-platform desktop app and CLI toolkit for exporting lyrics from ProPresenter.

Monday, February 2, 2026 | 6 minutes Read

The Meeting Didn’t Fail — The Framing Did

A new year feels like a reset. Every conversation we start — whether it’s with engineers deep in the detail or people sitting in the core decision-making space — comes with a fresh set of possibilities. But only if we slow down enough to actually use them. Most transformation work doesn’t fail because people disagree. It fails because everyone is answering a different question. Engineering is thinking about feasibility and architecture. Finance is thinking about cost and run-rate. Leadership is thinking about risk, timing, and confidence.

Friday, January 2, 2026 | 3 minutes Read