Thirty years of shipping software businesses run on.

My latest product: tasks, habits, and workouts in one place. Nested subtasks, notes and attachments, recurring tasks, streak grids, workout logs with sets and reps. It works offline, syncing back up when a connection returns. I run it in production and use it every day.

It shipped as Mike’s Todo App and grew into DayKeep, on its own domain. It’s the only project on this page you can open right now. There’s a free plan; trying it costs nothing but an email address.

The Serratos family runs Professional Auto Care in Houston. In 2012 I built them ServiceSmart: repair orders, customers, scheduling, billing. They have opened it every working morning since. Fourteen years of continuous production use, and counting.

The shop and I co-own the ServiceSmart application, and I keep improving it: a ground-up v2 in Go, PostgreSQL, and HTMX is in progress this year.

Nineteen years with one energy brokerage: fourteen on staff as a senior developer, then five more under contract after BGC Partners took ownership. I owned systems end to end: database, services, UI, and the production support that comes with them. Along the way the toolset moved from Delphi to successive versions of C#/.NET.

In-house software doesn’t leave screenshots behind when you go. It leaves a register:

A separate client, carried for four years alongside the Amerex work: I built and ran LPA, the Lease Production Analyzer, for Quantum Energy Partners, the Houston energy-investment firm. Compiling and analyzing the government’s oil-and-gas lease data had been a week-long job; LPA turned it around in minutes.

The engine behind it was substantial for its day: 38 GB of SQL Server feeding an 8 GB Analysis Services cube. I owned it end to end: the load, the OLAP model, and the queries that ran against it, the same as everything else on this page.

Where it started. I co-founded Tracker Business Systems with two local businessmen and wrote BizTrack, business-management software for Herbalife distributors: contacts, sales, orders, inventory, a to-do list, even a built-in word processor. One integrated system: sell an item and the stock adjusted; take an order and the month’s volume recalculated.

I was the only developer, and also the webmaster, network admin, salesman, and support line. It sold for $179.95 by download, 800 number, and convention booths in Las Vegas, from Delphi 1 on Windows 3.1 through the 32-bit rewrite I shipped in 1998. After I moved to Houston in 1999, the product kept selling without me into 2003.

In June 1998 the warez group Drink or Die released a cracked copy and rated it 9/10 in the release notes. Nobody pirates software nobody wants.

A nights-and-weekends product under my own label: a master-password vault for Windows 95, shipped in April 1997, the same season as Password Safe, the program usually credited as the first dedicated password manager. Mine sold about ten copies by mailed check.

No screenshot survives. What survives is the crack scene’s paper trail: the nag screen was a custom Delphi form that sidestepped the usual debugger breakpoints, and the tutorial written to defeat it circulated in cracking archives for five years.