Deep dives into the projects, problems, and occasional rabbit holes I find worth writing down — by Scott Steinmetz.
A customer places an order on your website. The order confirmation never shows up. They email you asking if the order went through, or worse, they call their bank and dispute the charge. Most of the time, the email was sent. It just landed in their spam folder. Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo have gotten much […]
Every time I publish a blog post, I have a second job. Open Facebook, paste the link, write a caption. Open LinkedIn, do it again. It only takes a few minutes, but it is exactly the kind of chore that gets skipped on a busy day, and a post nobody sees might as well not […]
A client of mine came to me with a strange problem. The person who keeps their website up to date could still log in. They could still change other parts of the site. But the moment they tried to edit a regular page, the screen went blank except for one line: “This content is blocked. […]
Every few months, someone in my family gets told to “just fax it over.” A doctor’s office needs a signed form. An insurance company wants a copy of a bill. A county office will not take email, period. Nobody in my family owns a fax machine, and nobody wants one. The usual workaround is driving […]
Everything in this series so far — the jobs, the parts, the dispatch board, the nine add-ons — runs quietly in the background. None of it matters if the people actually doing the work can’t get to it. A technician standing in a parking lot needs a screen that works on his phone. A dispatcher […]
The core of FieldOS — jobs, parts, dispatch, billing — runs the daily grind for any field service business. But “runs the daily grind” and “runs the whole business” are different problems, and every business’s gap between the two looks different. An HVAC company lives and dies by scheduled maintenance visits. A body shop cares […]
A while back, I built a complete field service management platform for the first time. It worked. But building it taught me as much about what I’d do differently as it taught me about field service software itself. So I built it again — FieldOS — the way I’d build it now, with everything I […]
There’s a specific kind of worry every parent knows — it’s been longer than it should, and you don’t know exactly where your kid is. Not panic, just that itch that makes you check your phone every few minutes. We already had a chore tracker every family member used daily — ChoreQuest, the app I […]
I’m the only maintenance person for seven business locations. A dealership, a parts warehouse, a body shop, and five separate auto parts stores, plus the service trucks that move between them. When something breaks, I’m the one who gets the call, no matter which of the seven sites it’s at. The calls used to come […]
For most people, communication is effortless. You think of something, and the words come out. For millions of people, that connection is broken — not because the thinking isn’t there, but because the body doesn’t cooperate. A child with autism who understands everything said to them but cannot form spoken words. An adult who survived […]
My clients build impressive things for other businesses. But when I ask them to describe their most recent project in plain English, they immediately reach for technical terms their clients would never understand. A custom inventory system becomes “a full-stack application with a database backend.” A client-facing booking tool becomes “an API-connected web application.” The […]
My two kids could not complete chores consistently. That’s the whole problem. We tried several off-the-shelf chore apps. They all share the same design assumption: a recurring chore is a single task that resets when you check it off. Miss Monday? You’re blocked. The platform won’t generate Tuesday’s instance until you either mark Monday done […]
How I turned WooCommerce orders into one-click PayPal invoices for my print shop — and the three problems hiding under that one button: making the math land exactly on the penny, a bug only a real payment could catch, and a permission that was locked the whole time.
A $30 USB TV tuner that Linux refused to recognize — so I wrote the driver myself. The story of getting free over-the-air TV onto a Raspberry Pi, two bugs that disguised themselves as something else, and the open-source driver I published so nobody else has to.