September 2, 2026

Why I'm Building This in Public

I’m a loss control consultant. I spend my days inspecting commercial properties and writing the reports underwriters use to price risk. It’s solid work, and I’m good at it, but it’s not the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do.

For years, I’ve had a running list of things I actually cared about — music, cybersecurity, building software, making things people could use — and a running excuse for why none of them got finished: I had to go make money instead. That trade-off felt permanent. Every time I picked one of those interests back up, something more urgent pushed it back down.

What’s changed recently isn’t the list. It’s that I can now sit down with an AI tool, describe what I want to build, and actually get somewhere — not a toy demo, but real, working software — in an evening instead of a semester. That doesn’t make the work free, and it doesn’t make me an expert overnight. It does mean the gap between “I have an idea” and “I have something real” got a lot smaller, and I want to see how far that actually goes.

So here’s the plan. I’m building three things, in public, and writing about all of it — including the parts that don’t work:

A loss control platform. This one draws directly on my day job. Independent loss control consultants like me spend a lot of time on scheduling, status tracking, and report drafting — time that isn’t spent actually inspecting anything. I’m scoping a lightweight, affordable alternative to the enterprise platforms, aimed at consultants, not carriers.

A browser-based synth. I like music production and I don’t like paying $200 for a plugin when I could understand how it works instead. Starting with the basics — oscillators, filters, envelopes — and seeing how far I can take it.

An interactive history map. A way to travel the globe and a timeline at once, and see what was actually happening, everywhere, at a given point in time. Mostly because I think it’d be a genuinely useful and interesting thing to have, and I have no idea yet how to build it — which is exactly why it’s on the list.

This site is the record of all three. I’ll post when things work, when they don’t, and what I actually learned in between. If you’ve got your own list of things you keep meaning to get back to, I’d like to think this is useful to you too — not as proof that it’s easy, but as evidence that it’s possible to start.