About

Who I am

I work in IT. Systems administration, troubleshooting, infrastructure maintenance — the kind of work where you spend a lot of time keeping things running and not much time building new things. I am not a formally trained software engineer and I did not go to school for computer science.

I learned to build software by building software. Mostly by breaking things, reading documentation at 11pm, and starting over. Python first. Then SQLite because I needed to store something. Then a web server because I wanted to see it in a browser. That pattern repeated until I had something that worked.

What kept failing

For years, I started large projects that went nowhere. An inventory system that needed a proper schema before I could start. A task manager that needed user accounts before it could be useful. A home dashboard that needed to be scalable before I had a single feature working. Every project started with an architecture and ended in a folder I stopped opening.

The problem wasn't ability. The problem was scope. I was designing for a version three that I never got to version one to build.

What changed

I started finishing small things. A script that sent me a Telegram message every morning. A local search tool for my own notes. A recipe app that ran on my home network and did one thing well. None of these were impressive. All of them worked. All of them got used.

The shift was figuring out that a working local app is a complete thing. It doesn't need cloud infrastructure. It doesn't need other users. If it solves your problem on your machine, you built software.

Why this site exists

Every time I started a new build, the first day disappeared into setup decisions that had nothing to do with the idea. Which database. Which framework. How to structure the folders. These decisions are not interesting and they are not the reason you sit down to build something.

The Starter Kit is the setup I made for myself, packaged so you can skip that first day. It comes with a folder structure, working boilerplate, and checklists that assume you know roughly what you want to build and just need to start.

The path I used was: pick a small idea, build it locally in a focused stretch of time, ship it to myself, and learn from what actually happened. The kit is the version of that path you can follow.

What I use

Day to day: Python, SQLite, Node.js, a terminal, and a browser. I use Linux on my main machine and a Mac for testing mobile layouts. I don't have strong opinions about text editors. I have strong opinions about not adding dependencies without a clear reason.

Contact

If you bought the kit and something's wrong, reach out. If you want to tell me what you built with it, I'd genuinely like to hear that.

This site is both my portfolio and the path I used.
The kit is simply the version you can follow.