Hello, world. Again.

Every programmer's first program says hello to the world. Mine is a blog, so I'm saying hello with words instead. Please enjoy this very original opening.

The gap

I've worked in customer support for 13 years. If you do that long enough, you stop seeing products and start seeing gaps. The thing the product almost does. The question every customer asks because the screen doesn't answer it. The email thread that begins "Could you send me your PHP version?" and never gets cheerful.

Some gaps are big. Most are small and irritating, which is exactly why nobody fixes them. A roadmap has room for the exciting things. It has no room for "this one confusing thing, for everyone, forever".

So I started fixing them myself, evenings and weekends, in small tools. Each tool exists because I hit a gap often enough to get annoyed.

The deal I'm making with myself

Every project gets a post. Not a launch announcement (those are boring and always say "excited to announce"). A story: why I built it, what I wanted it to be, what went wrong on the way.

If a project is private, it still gets one. A tool nobody sees can still teach something.

What's here so far

Gatehouse, which watches what your WordPress plugins spend on AI. Helpdesk Hero, which ends the password-by-email era of support. Fixpass, which lets you point at the problem. Mitos Checklist, which turns Greek paperwork into checklists. SheetPilot, which turns spreadsheets into dashboards. And a private dashboard I built to count how many of you showed up.

Start anywhere. They don't need to be read in order, but they do make slightly more sense together.

Quality at scale is a design problem. So is a blog nobody reads, but let's start with the first one.

Pull up a chair. Type ls posts/.