Built by someone who did the job first.

Where the experience comes from

Two decades in manufacturing and industrial distribution — carbide cutting tools, ERP systems, distributor pricing, shop floors. It is an industry that moves enormous amounts of data through processes still being done by hand, and it is where I learned what a genuinely useful piece of software looks like to someone with a job to finish.

Nine years volunteering with a county search and rescue team, as a ground pounder, a licensed UAV pilot, and trained in search management. Six years shooting weddings, first as a second shooter and then leading. Different worlds, same pattern: skilled people improvising around software that was never meant for them.

Also a husband, and a father to three daughters — which is its own education in scheduling, triage, and being told plainly when something does not work.

Where the work comes from

Every product here began where the tools ran out. A spreadsheet doing a job it was never built for, a group text standing in for dispatch, a PDF standing in for a plan.

SAR21 exists because a phone tree cost the team twenty minutes before anyone could move. BasePlate exists because second shooting a wedding means working from someone else's PDF, and weddings run late — it has been carried through two of them now, once as second shooter and once as lead. ExhibitHawk exists because exhibits arrive late, a courtroom is not your conference room, and fumbling in front of a jury is expensive. TactiTurf exists because a whiteboard of coloured dots makes the players do the translating.

What that means for companies

The other half of the work is operational. Somewhere in most companies there is a process that has quietly outgrown the people doing it — a report rebuilt by hand every week, a stock figure that is always a day stale, a scheduling decision made from a spreadsheet nobody fully trusts.

That is the work worth automating. Not because the people are doing it badly, but because the volume passed what a person should be asked to hold in their head. GrindIQ replaced a spreadsheet-driven production schedule with a system the shop floor updates by scanning a traveller, synced live against NetSuite. The Destiny Tool catalog turned a printed book and a phone call into a live inventory lookup in a machinist's pocket.

How it's built

The stack varies with the problem — SwiftUI where it has to feel native, Tauri and Rust where it has to be local-first, Next.js and Firebase where a team needs a shared source of truth, Flutter where one catalog has to serve two platforms.

The constant is that these are tools used in the middle of something else: outdoors, in a courtroom, on a shop floor, at a reception venue with no signal. That settles a lot of decisions early. Local-first over cloud-first wherever the job allows it, no telemetry, and no feature that only works when the network does.

Working together

H3LX takes on a small number of client engagements a year. One person does the design, the code and the support, which is why the products have strong opinions and why the reply to your email comes from the person who wrote the thing. The Destiny Tool projects are the current example.