Secret Clubhouse Company

We take the cases
nobody's paying for.

A one-person outfit for side projects, half-finished experiments and software built at hours no reasonable person keeps. The lamp is on. The ladder is down.

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04 open cases 01 cold Filed under: nights & weekends

The Blog

Notes from the desk

July 28, 2026 · Eight minutes

The Case of the Vanishing Weekend

It started, as these things do, with a small idea and a clear Saturday. Two hours, tops. A script to rename some files. Nothing that would trouble anyone.

By Sunday night there was a config format, a test suite, a logo, and a domain name paid for in full. The files remained, to a one, unrenamed.

What follows is an honest accounting of where the time went, and an argument that the detour was the project — that the interesting part was never the renaming, and that we all know it.

The estimate is not a lie. The estimate is a hope, filed under oath, by someone who has not yet met the problem.

Fig. 1 — The office, 2:40 a.m. Rain on the glass, one lead, no client.

June 14, 2026

Notes From a Cold Server Room

Moving a homelab in the dark, one unlabelled cable at a time. Label your cables. This is the whole post. You will not label your cables.

May 02, 2026

Nobody Reads the Footnotes

In defense of over-documenting a project that exactly one person will ever run. That person is you, in fourteen months, with no memory of any of it.

April 19, 2026

A Ladder, Not a Staircase

On building things that are easy to climb into and just as easy to leave. The best clubhouse has one way up and no lock on the door.

Continued on page four The full archive →

Projects

Four files, one gone cold

Nightjar

Self-hosted · Started 2025

A feed reader that only surfaces what you actually read. It watches what you open, quietly drops what you don't, and never once asks you to declare inbox bankruptcy.

GoSQLiteHTMX

Active

Deadbolt

Command line · Started 2024

Secret rotation for the machines under the stairs. One command, every box, no dashboard, no monthly bill, and no vendor who knows your keys better than you do.

RustageSSH

Active

Paper Trail

iOS · Started 2026

Point it at a receipt, get a filed expense. Runs entirely on the phone — nothing leaves the device, which is the only interesting feature and also the hard part.

SwiftVisionOn-device

In progress

Lamplighter

Home automation · Shelved 2025

Lights that follow the sunset instead of the clock. Worked beautifully for eleven months, then the vendor changed the API and the case went cold. The notes are still good.

PythonESP32MQTT

Cold

We take the cases nobody's paying for.

The Blog

Projects

We take the cases
nobody's paying for.