Current projects and interests

The five year old

L is an absolutely wonderful little person. Her Paw Patrol interest has (thankfully) faded away, only to be replaced with Lego and Harry Potter. Wickedly compassionate, funny and imaginative, it is an unbelievable honour to be her dad.

Siteimp

I'm not really sure whether I'm a developer, into ops or just a Founder at heart? Siteimp emerged from all of those three interests. It started life as a really fast crawler named Trixie. Whenever I would deploy an app somewhere public, I would run Trixie to check links and make sure that everything returned the status code I was expected. From there, I started taking the site maps Trixie generated and start running payloads against them. My first payload was called Speed - it was initially powered by Google Lighthouse but has taken on more of its own features.

Siteimp made me a better software developer, but when Google announced that web performance was becoming an important ranking factor, I got the sense that a lot of digital marketers had just been hung out to dry. So I started work on an auditing and reporting tool. Siteimp was born. It uses Javascript to collect data and run tests, postgreSQL to hold onto all the data and Python to turn the data into stuff.

Formimp

When I started deploying really early versions of Siteimp out to digital marketers, I found a couple of things. First, I killed a few Wordpress sites (sorry again). And second, holy shit are there ever a lot of bad contact form plugins out there. Formimp was originally going to be a Wordpress plugin (and still might become one) but now it's just a very fast way to integrate contact forms in MS Teams, start your contacts inside of the O365 ecosystem and speed up your site at the same time.

I've learned some really interesting things from Formimp. The first is that there are some really talented writers working in spam. Some are absolute garbage, but a few? Holy hell, someone hire these cats. The second is that some people who program spam bots are really good at the job. Others are really bad. Good writers and developers seem to work in a few key industries. It's really interesting watching this and I'm learning a lot about digital marketing.

Incidentally, if you write spam, you should contact me. I'd love to find a way for us to work together on something. Some of you are immensely talented writers and I dig working with talented writers.

What is an imp, really?

If you read my marketing stuff, you likely think that an imp is a playful, mischievous creature. I like having fun and can be described as mischievous so blah blah blah. In truth, an imp was an available domain suffix on a .com tld. It was either Form/Siteimp or something unpronounceable. I figure it's better to be an imp than a dfhk, you know?