I’m Jay. I live in Hervey Bay, on the Queensland coast, and I build a range of small, honest software: web tools, Mac apps, and the occasional thing only I will ever use.
None of it is trying to be the next big platform. Each one solves a real, specific annoyance, ships, and then gets out of your way. I’d rather have a handful of useful things people actually reach for than one grand thing that never leaves the workshop.
How I think about building
A few things I’ll die on a hill for:
- Done is better than perfect. Getting something real out the door beats polishing it forever. That’s not an excuse for shortcuts. It means staying locked on the core job instead of the fun distractions around it.
- Build what’s needed, not what’s cool. The cool feature is usually the one to build last, if at all.
- Software is mostly plumbing, not inventing. I wire together things that already work (Postgres, Stripe and Square, AWS, the good AI models) rather than rebuild what smarter people already solved. “Internet plumber” is on my business card in spirit, and I mean it as a compliment to myself.
- Honest over clever. A tool shouldn’t lie to you, lock you in, or quietly cook your laptop. If it didn’t do something, it should say so rather than pretend.
I haven’t hand-written much code in a while. These days I build with Claude Code, running a fairly specific, well-worn sequence that keeps it reliable. The experience underneath is still years of shipping software; the tooling just makes the loop from idea to shipped a lot shorter.
What I build
Lately most of my attention is on Previously, a local-first screen and audio memory engine for the Mac. It recaps everything you saw and said, and won’t make up the parts it missed. It’s the honesty rule above, turned into a product.
Want to get in touch, or keep the tinkering fuelled? The about page has the details.