Digital Tide, 2025 to now
Digital Tide
After enough years running organizations you stop being able to do the work, and then you start making decisions for teams from a model of engineering that is five years stale. Digital Tide is how I keep that from happening. Small companies, real production systems, and me on the hook for all of it.
- Structure
- My own LLC, in Tennessee
- Companies taken to production
- Two
- Role
- Principal
- Covers
- Infrastructure to launch, and the brand on top
This is not a firm I am trying to grow and it is not a hedge against the job market. It is a small practice with a short client list, and the reason it exists is that I wanted to stay able to build the things I ask teams to build.
The work is end to end on purpose. I take an early-stage company from a name to a running business without them hiring an engineer: cloud infrastructure, DNS, email and identity, the deployment pipeline, the production launch, and the brand and the logo on top of it.
Identities I designed
Brand and logo design, alongside the engineering. It is the half of this work I am least expected to have and the half I would least want to give up.
- Digital Tide
That Paleo Chick
SanBar Solutions
What I have built
That Paleo Chick
A paleo recipe and health publication I build and operate end to end, plus the agentic content pipeline behind it and a React Native iOS app on the same content API. The largest of these by a distance, and the one with the most to say about how I design systems that use models.
- Agentic pipeline
- Ghost
- AWS
- Cloudflare
- React Native
- Stripe
Charter
The proposal, contract and invoicing platform I run my own business on. A Next.js and React front end, an Express API deployed as serverless functions against serverless Postgres with row-level security, multi-tenant workspaces with role-based access, payments, transactional mail, document storage, and a React Native companion app. I built it because I needed it, which is also what makes it honest: I send real invoices and real contracts through it, so every rough edge is one I have to live with.
- Next.js
- React 19
- TypeScript
- Express on serverless
- Postgres with row-level security
- Multi-tenant auth
- Stripe
- React Native
AdGenius
An ad creative studio that generates platform-ready advertising across Meta, TikTok, Google Display and LinkedIn from a single design. It grew directly out of the Greedy engagement below: once I had built the manual production system and felt how much of it was mechanical, automating that part was the obvious move. Generation for copy variants and backgrounds, automated layout validation for clipping and overlap, and bundle export at every required size.
- React 19
- TypeScript
- Vite
- Gemini
- Automated layout validation
Greedy
A direct-to-consumer nutrition brand, where I run the paid media and the measurement behind it and manage the Shopify store it all points at. I did not build the store's theme. What is mine is everything that tells you whether it is working: Tag Manager on the store with analytics and the advertising pixel firing through it, cross-domain tracking so a session survives the hop into the hosted checkout, a merchant feed, and a dashboard reporting the whole funnel from product view through add to cart, checkout, payment and purchase. Alongside it, a creative production system where one concept produces thirteen artboards at exact required pixel sizes from a single workflow, organized by funnel stage before platform, with linked smart objects so one edit propagates everywhere and scripted batch export at the end. The measurement half is the one I would defend hardest. A store that cannot tell you where its funnel leaks is a store running on opinion, and cross-domain tracking into a hosted checkout is exactly the kind of thing that looks configured and silently is not.
- Shopify store management
- Google Tag Manager
- GA4 and advertising pixels
- Cross-domain funnel tracking
- Looker Studio
- Meta, Google Display and Performance Max
- Scripted batch export
SanBar Solutions
A Next.js site on AWS with Google Workspace and DNS, and the brand and logo work alongside it. The straightforward version of standing a company up.
- Next.js
- AWS
- Google Workspace
- DNS
- Brand and logo
What running it teaches me
Three things, and all three have changed how I manage.
The first is cost. When the invoice is yours, you size things differently. I right-sized services at Button because I could read a bill; I read bills that closely because I have paid my own.
The second is how much of modern delivery is identity and secrets rather than code. Every one of these projects spent more time on federated access, scoped credentials and rotation than on any feature, and that ratio is the same on a platform team at scale. Engineers feel it as friction and leaders often never see it at all.
The third is that building with models is a design discipline, not a tooling choice. That argument is made properly on its own page.
Stack
- Build
- TypeScript, Next.js and React, React Native, Node.js, Tailwind, Postgres
- Run
- AWS and GCP, Cloudflare, Terraform, Docker, GitHub Actions, Managed secrets over federated identity
- The business layer
- Stripe, Managed authentication and multi-tenant workspaces, Transactional email, DNS, domains and mail, Shopify store management, Tag Manager, GA4 and funnel reporting, Brand, logo and UI design