I build the web presence for businesses I'll probably never visit in person — and I've made peace with that.

I started out fixing WordPress themes for a college project that never should have needed fixing in the first place. That was the moment I realized most business websites aren't badly designed because their owners have bad taste — they're badly designed because nobody translated the taste into code correctly.

Since then I've worked mostly with founders and small teams in the US and Canada: a coffee roaster in Toronto who needed subscriptions to actually work, a Denver SaaS team drowning in support tickets caused by a confusing dashboard, a furniture studio in Ohio that wanted their site to feel as considered as their furniture. None of them needed me in the room. They needed someone who'd answer a Slack message at 9pm their time and ship something that worked the first time.

That's most of what I do differently: I keep US/Canada-friendly hours, I write scopes and estimates in plain English before touching code, and I test everything on the devices your actual customers use — not just the laptop on my desk.

Outside client work, I read about typography more than is probably healthy, and I'm slowly teaching myself Swift so I stop saying "I mostly do web" when people ask what I build.