Thirty-one years of shipping software.

BizTrack

I co-founded Tracker Business Systems with two local businessmen and wrote BizTrack, business software for Herbalife distributors: contacts, sales, orders, inventory, a to-do list, even a built-in word processor. One integrated system: sell an item and the stock adjusted; take an order and the month's volume recalculated.

I was the only developer, and also the webmaster, network admin, salesman and support line. It sold for $179.95 by download, an 800 number, and convention booths in Las Vegas, from Delphi 1 on Windows 3.1 through the 32-bit rewrite I shipped in 1998. After I moved to Houston in 1999, it kept selling without me into 2003.

In June 1998 Drink or Die released a cracked copy and rated it 9/10.

Personal Password Vault

A product under my own label: a master-password vault for Windows 95, shipped in April 1997, the same season as Password Safe, the program usually credited as the first dedicated password manager. Mine sold about ten copies, by mailed check.

No screenshot survives. What survives is the crack scene's paper trail: the nag screen was a custom Delphi form that sidestepped the usual debugger breakpoints, and the tutorial written to defeat it circulated in cracking archives for five years.

“I ended up using what I'd consider a very ‘dirty’ crack.”

C4N-PPV.TXT · drlan, “Cracking 4 Newbies,” 8 July 1997.

Amerex, the trading floor

Nineteen years with one energy brokerage: fourteen on staff as a senior developer, then five more under contract after BGC Partners took ownership. I owned systems end to end: database, services, UI, and the production support that comes with them. The toolset moved from Delphi to successive versions of C# and .NET.

In-house software doesn't leave screenshots behind when you go. It leaves a register:

ServiceSmart

The Serratos family runs Professional Auto Care in Houston. In 2012 I built them ServiceSmart: repair orders, customers, scheduling, billing. They have opened it every working morning since. Fourteen years of continuous production use, and counting.

The shop and I co-own it, and I keep improving it. This year I'm building version 3 from the ground up: Go and PostgreSQL on the server, and the same Go rules inside the app, so a total the customer approves at the counter matches the server's to the cent.

It keeps working when the internet doesn't. Each iPad keeps its own copy of the shop, so the counter can check a car in, move a job along and take photos with no connection at all. The changes wait on the device and go up within seconds of the line coming back. If two people changed the same thing while apart, nothing is quietly lost: the app lists what didn't save and offers it back.

→

The years away

For a long stretch, my dad needed me more than any client did. In 2019 I stopped taking contract work to be there for him.

The AI chapter

When AI coding tools first came out, I liked them. You pasted in some code, asked for help, and got a snippet back to drop in. That beat scouring the internet and Stack Overflow.

Then they got good enough to worry me. Thirty years of doing this, and it looked like it might make all of it worthless. For a while, that depressed me.

In the last nine months or so, everything came together. Agents stopped handing me snippets and started building with me, and they've gone past anything I expected. Features that would have taken me years on my own are finally within reach. I built the to-do app I always wanted, with features I couldn't find in any of the big apps.

DayKeep is built by me and a team of AI agents. I decide what gets built, and nothing ships without my say.

DayKeep

It started as Mike's Todo App, a to-do list I wrote for myself, and grew into a family of apps on its own domain. I run it in production and use it every day. No ads, ever.

There's a free plan. For now, signing up means joining the wait list. Join the wait list at daykeep.io →

The short version, why I build it, is on daykeep.io: Why DayKeep →