I've been writing code since I was 14. I started Beyond The Brackets at 18 and bootstrapped it, and people have come to me for two reasons ever since: to build a product from scratch, or to take over one that nobody dares to touch anymore.
The second kind taught me most of what I know. Inheriting a codebase whose author has left, or one generated by AI tools, taught me how software actually fails in production, and what it takes to make it dependable again.
I have rarely worked alone. I lead a team of developers and designers, and the work usually arrives as a business problem rather than a specification: what the product has to do, what it is worth building, and who keeps it running once we have gone. On the same project I will do the audit, the architecture, the product decisions and the handover, so I read a system end to end rather than only the part I was handed.
I always work in the same order.
- ReadRead the code and say plainly what holds and what doesn't.
- FixFix what breaks or puts data at risk.
- BuildOnly then build what comes next.
That habit is what led me to build Grace.