Product brief · 22 September 2026
Why I built Brutal Scheduler.
Scheduling can turn into a stream of messages, reminders and rearranged appointments. I built Brutal Scheduler to make that work easier to manage.
Read the briefField notes
Working observations from building and operating software.
Notes on production engineering, commercially useful AI, system design and the decisions that keep software valuable after launch.
Launch brief · 31 July 2026
What launching Residex taught me about building products online.
Residex began with a manual, high-stakes problem: helping people who move between countries understand how their days affect their residency position. Notes on validating demand, choosing a stack and learning when the product should become simpler.
Read the briefProduction
A prototype proves an interaction. Production software carries a responsibility.
Once a system matters to revenue, operations or a client deliverable, the work changes. Failure modes, access, data quality, deployment, support and the next change all become part of the product. Speed still matters, but only in combination with the judgement to know what cannot be left implicit.
Applied AI
The best AI feature may be the least visible one.
Evidence extraction, classification and drafting can remove hours of handling without asking the user to perform a new ritual with a chatbot. The interface should expose the decision, provenance and review point—not celebrate the model for its own sake.
Architecture
Business logic deserves a clear home.
Rules scattered across screens, database queries and manual exceptions become expensive to explain and dangerous to change. A system becomes easier to operate when its important logic is explicit, testable and visible through an interface appropriate to the people responsible for it.
Delivery
Scope is a commercial decision, not an administrative exercise.
A smaller first release is useful only when it preserves the reason the product should exist. Cutting the differentiating workflow to protect a deadline produces software that launches quickly and proves very little. Good scope protects the valuable job and removes everything that does not support it.
Ownership
The person writing the software should understand why it is being built.
Commercial context changes technical decisions: what must remain flexible, where failure is expensive, which data deserves provenance and what can be deliberately simple. Losing that context through layers of handoff is one of the quiet costs of conventional delivery.