Built for real operations — here's one
A machine shop's whole work-tracking system
A machine shop needed to know a simple thing that no off-the-shelf product would tell it: where does the shop's time actually go? Orders moved through the floor on paper and memory; productivity was a feeling, not a number.
The tool I built became the shop's operating rhythm. Workers badge in and out of jobs with a barcode scan — no keyboards on the floor, no forms. The system keeps the order log, generates the packing slips, and turns the scans into reporting the owner actually wanted: a 15-minute-interval heatmap of worker activity showing exactly where the day went, plus order and task views for the office.
It was run like a product, not a favor: versioned releases, each with a written change log, planned features tracked and delivered, and the edge cases of a real floor handled — like workers forgetting to badge out of one task before starting the next.
The activity heatmap, from the live tool — each cell is a 15-minute interval, colored by concurrent load. Names anonymized.
Requirements gathered from the shop floor, built against the real order log, iterated on operator feedback after delivery. That lifecycle — not the code — is the product.
Same discipline, different operations
New Patient Tracker
Tracks new patients from first contact through scheduling — with referral-source analytics, so the practice could finally see which channels actually produce patients. Automated email notifications included.
Released, upgraded and documented like a productContracting Calculator
Manages negotiated insurance rates across carriers, built directly against the practice's master fee schedule — the rules that lived in the contracting manager's head, made checkable.
Iterated on documented client feedback after deliveryCopay Calculator
Estimates a patient's procedure cost by procedure code and payer, using the real allowable schedules — an answer at the front desk instead of a callback.
Multiple fee-schedule revisions carried through productionPayment Estimator
Patient payment estimation at the point of service — what will this cost me, answered before the visit instead of on the bill.
Release notes and operational documentation shipped with itLab Results Portal
A web portal giving a clinical lab's clients direct access to their results — replacing manual result distribution with self-service delivery.
Public-facing · ran the lab's daily result deliveryClosed-loop climate controller
A controller that chases the correct variable (vapor-pressure deficit, a moving target), with dual-band hysteresis across coupled heater/humidifier loops and fail-safe-off on stale sensor data — the rules an expert grower holds in their head, encoded and running unattended.
Two vendor IoT APIs integrated · fail-safe by design