I run the operations.
I build the systems.
Four-site hospitality group in the West Midlands. Most of the third-party software this business used to pay for has been replaced with tooling I designed and shipped myself — a kitchen compliance app, a staff management iOS app on the App Store, a QR order-and-pay platform taking live card payments, an AI email agent, an automated invoice pipeline and an in-house reservations system.
I don't buy the software. I build it.
Hospitality runs on subscriptions. Compliance platform, workforce platform, reservations platform — each one a monthly line that never quite fits how the business actually works, and none of them talking to each other.
I replaced them. Not with configuration, but with systems built against this operation, shipped into live service, and maintained since. The kitchen app feeds the weekly management report. The staff app enforces PII separation the bought product never had. The bookings engine writes into the same database as everything else.
What follows is twelve of them, every one in service, with what went wrong on the way included.
Every figure traceable to a source document.
Twenty-one systems, all of them in service.
Three pages, grouped by the kind of work. Open any project for what it does, what I built, and what went wrong on the way.
Systems & product
Things I designed, built and shipped into live service — apps, payment platforms, agents, and the databases underneath them.
- QR order-and-pay · 43 locations
- Staff management iOS app · App Store
- AI email agent · guard layer
- In-room guest guides · per room
Client work
Systems built for people who pay for them — across serviced lets, hospitality, cleaning and aviation catering.
- Apartment access & pricing · live
- White-label staff app · App Store
- Rota & wages app · Google Play
- Platform review · consultancy
Data & reporting
The reporting the business runs on, and the pipelines that feed it. Every figure traceable to a source document.
- Weekly food & GP reporting
- Invoice pipeline · stdlib only
- B2B campaign · three markets
Operations & compliance
Resilience, governance, and the documentation that has to survive an inspection — including what is still open.
- Database security audit · 55 tables
- Compliance framework · 31 documents
- Backup system · nine databases
Four rules that show up in every build.
Prove it cheaply before you spend
Before committing to custom hardware for the wearable, I ran phone-recorded audio through transcription to test whether the premise held at all. It did, so the hardware got built. The invoice pipeline went the other way — two approaches were tried and abandoned on real constraints before the third one shipped.
Ship without stopping service
The database remediation touched 55 production tables carrying live payroll and guest data. It went out in four sequenced stages — additive policies, app release, device rollout confirmation, then removal of the permissive ones — specifically so it could land mid-service without locking a single member of staff out.
Read the raw error
A payment failure that looked like an account problem turned out to be a mangled key value. A greeting cutting off mid-sentence turned out to be line noise triggering a speech barge-in on a one-second timeout. Neither was visible in a dashboard. Both were sitting in the logs.
Write down what's still exposed
The security audit shipped with its remaining gaps documented rather than buried: an unrate-limited PIN endpoint, twelve-hour JWTs with no refresh, and the fact that row-level security filters rows but not columns. A handover that hides the weak points isn't a handover.
What I build with, and what I built with it.
Grouped by the job rather than the vendor — each tool listed against the thing on this site it actually produced.
Databases & data
Every system on this page writes to Postgres. The security work, the backups and the reporting all start there.
Building things people use
Two apps in daily use by staff, one on the App Store, and the guest-facing platforms alongside them.
Money moving
The part that has to be right. Live card payments across 43 locations, reconciled against the database.
Automation & AI
Scheduled work that runs without me, with deterministic guard rails around anything a model proposes.
Hardware
One project, but it covers the ground from board to phone app.