About
I get hired to build products. Sometimes that is a mobile app from an empty repo through to the App Store — Zums and the first release of Shredder were both mine start to finish. Sometimes it is the web side: at Promote I built the campaign manager, the creator-facing views, the leaderboard and the internal admin panel. Often it is both, plus whatever runs behind them.
Alongside that I design, build and ship my own products. Client work is where I learn what breaks once real people are using something; my own products are where I own every decision from research through App Review, with nobody to hand the hard parts to.
Before both, I spent three terms writing internal software at the National Research Council and at Fisheries and Oceans — Power Platform tooling, an Angular and Electron metadata recorder, and a file search I cut from about twenty minutes to a few seconds. Mostly the unglamorous kind of work where the system has to keep running while you replace it.
The through-line is that I like problems where the constraint is real: no network, no account, a migration that cannot go down, or a price a tradesperson has to understand in one read.
What I'm building
Pengu Focus
LivePomodoro and single-focus sessions with social rooms, streaks, and a penguin you dress up with fish you earn by showing up. Built and released solo.
Built and released alone.
Billhead
LiveFully offline, no account, pay once instead of subscribing. Built after reading 271 one- and two-star reviews of the invoicing apps people were quitting.
Built alone — research, design, build and store release.
Holdfast
In reviewLive Activity and Dynamic Island, home and lock-screen widgets, and a real alarm at the end of a fast through AlarmKit.
Built alone — research, design, build and store release.
Space Showcase
LivePulls a random image from NASA's archive with the description of what was happening when it was taken, and reads it to you. Built for myself because I wanted it to exist.
Built alone, for myself.
Where I've worked and studied
How I build
I ship the whole thing
Zums was the app and the operator dashboard running quests and payouts behind it. Billhead and Holdfast went from research to App Review. When I say I built something, I mean the interface, the backend and the release — not a slice in the middle.
The boring solution usually wins
Shredy is presented as an intelligent matchmaker and is exactly that: deterministic scoring, not a model. At Fisheries and Oceans a twenty-minute search became a few seconds by indexing metadata into a database instead of querying blob storage directly. Neither was clever. Both were right.
Research before code
Billhead started with 271 hand-classified one- and two-star reviews of the apps people were leaving. The pay-once model, the offline-first constraint and the permanent export promise all came out of reading those, not out of a brainstorm.