THE LAB

Things I built because I wanted them to exist

Not client work. Trip planners, internal tools, a meal-planning app that never got past its own icon and one game about a marketer with a hammer. This is what it looks like when building systems is the default reaction to any problem. It is also where the “-well” naming habit started, before it turned into a brand.

01 / BUILT AND IN USE

Earning their keep

Live, in use

World Cup 2026 Tracker

A command centre for my family World Cup trip across North America: five legs, six flights, five hotels and three match tickets, editable from any phone with realtime sync.

The bookings lived in eleven confirmation emails. So instead of a spreadsheet, AI parsed every email straight into a database and the app was live the next day. My family does not care about the stack. They care that nobody has to ask where we are staying in Kansas City.

  • React
  • Supabase
  • Magic-link auth
  • Cloudflare Pages
Live, end to end

Clawwell

A self-service platform for setting up AI assistants. A non-technical person walks through a wizard, name, personality, keys, messaging, and gets their own assistant running on its own cloud server. No terminal at any point.

Deploying these assistants by hand meant messing about in people’s terminals and getting things wrong. Clawwell bakes every hard-won lesson into a repeatable flow: the wizard provisions the server, wires up the messaging and hands you a dashboard to manage and restart it. One person, one wizard, one assistant of their own.

  • Lovable
  • Supabase
  • n8n
  • Hetzner
Live, free to use

Validatewell

A free email validation tool: upload a list, get structured verdicts back. Powers the cleanse step in our database work and runs as a free public tool at validatewell.com.

Email validation vendors charge by the thousand for something that is mostly a protocol conversation. So this exists. It quietly does the verification inside our client database cleansing too, which is the pattern with most of these: built once for us, then it earns its keep everywhere.

  • n8n
  • Webhook API
Internal tool, guide coming

GSC indexing audit kit

A diagnostic script and checklist that works out why Google is not indexing your pages, starting with the property-type mismatch that quietly breaks most audits.

Born the hard way: a client site where broken programmatic pages were throttling the crawl for the whole domain. The fix is now a script we point at any site. The full method is being written up as a free guide.

  • TypeScript
  • Search Console API

02 / BUILT FOR THE FUN OF IT

No business case, no roadmap

The stuff that got made because I wanted it, or because it made me laugh.

What’s for Tea

Concept, app icon stage

THE ICON

A family meal-planning app. Everyone logs in and adds dinner ideas, it picks the week’s meals, one choice each plus a new recipe to try, and writes the shopping list at the end.

It also remembers what we have already had, so we are not on the same thing every Tuesday. Got as far as the concept and the app icon you see above, which by family software standards is further than most projects get.

THE CONCEPT, ROUGHLY

  • Mon · FajitasDean’s pick
  • Tue · Katsu currykid one’s pick
  • Wed · Lasagnekid two’s pick
  • Thu · Something newnew recipe
  • Shopping listwrites itself

Horatio’s AI Content Smash

BUILT FOR A LAUGH
AI

SMASH THE SLOP. SPARE THE HUMAN-MADE.

An 8-bit side-scroller. Horatio is an angry marketer who runs along smashing AI-generated content with a hammer, while trying not to clobber the human-made stuff by mistake.

Built purely for a laugh. Some ideas are too good to leave on the to-do list, and an angry pixel marketer with a hammer was one of them.

This energy, pointed at your business

The same speed and the same standards, aimed at the expensive repetitive thing your company does every week. Book a free 30-minute call and tell us what that is.

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