I've spent the last several months doing something I never expected: completely rethinking what I want my work to be. I mentioned before that I've "opened my doors" for business, and right now I'm in that strange early stage where the shop lights are on, the tools are out, the sign says OPEN—and no one's lined up yet. It's been like that for weeks... Instead of panicking, I've been using this time to learn, refine, and get painfully honest about what I want to offer and why. I've gone in circles trying to define it: performance fix‑it guy, general WordPress contractor, performance‑first developer. It's been a grind, but clarity came from doing the work, not just thinking about it.

I originally thought I'd focus entirely on fixing broken, slow, tangled WordPress websites. I’ve done a lot of that work for free—enough to know it matters, but that' it's a nightmare. The world does need people who can untangle those kinds of messes, and I still plan to do that, but what became obvious is that the world needs something else even more: someone who builds things to perform well from the very beginning. That's where I've found some clarity in my positioning.

For over a decade at WebDevStudios and Awesome Motive, I worked deep in backend systems. I grew a lot there, but I also drifted away from the thing that first got me into this field: designing and building websites—or as a good friend used to put it, "just building fucking great websites." Lately, I’ve been getting back into that part. Web Design, frontend, the full vision of how something should look, feel, load, and behave, paired with the six last months I've spent studying web performance non-stop. It's created an unexpected combination I didn’t see coming honestly: positioning myself as performance-first developer.

So that’s where I’ve landed: and the doors are open, even if a line isn't forming yet. I'm reaching out, learning, leveling up while I figure the business side of this all out. But I'm also finding my own place in the process.