Hi, I'm Jake.

I am a builder. That is the simplest true thing I can say about myself. I have always taken things apart to see how they work, and these days I spend most of my spare hours putting new things together.

I came up in operations, which is a generous way of saying I spent years learning how real work actually gets done, and where it quietly breaks. It turned out to be the best training I could have asked for. The interesting problems are almost never the ones on the slide. They are buried in the day to day, in the parts everyone has stopped looking at.

Here is what I cannot get over. For most of history, building something real took a team and a budget and someone's permission. That is over. One curious person with the right tools can make almost anything now. I built an iOS app without writing the code myself. I have shipped tools that handed people their afternoons back. I am writing a stack of white papers because I finally have something I want to say. None of that was within reach for someone like me a few years ago, and I am still a little stunned by it.

So I build. A lot of it is small. Some of it works. Plenty of it has flopped, and I am genuinely fine with that, because every dead end taught me something I used on the next thing. I would rather make ten honest attempts than sit around waiting for the perfect one.

Underneath all of it, the thing I care about most is helping people get the boring work off their plate, so they can spend their time on the part that actually needs a person. That is the thread. It runs through the apps, the tools, and the writing alike.

When I am not building, I am home in Bentonville, Arkansas, with my wife and our four kids. That is the center of it all. The rest is just me chasing the things I think are worth making, and trying to learn out loud while I do.