About

Most software gets built from descriptions. Someone explains what they need, a developer translates that into screens and buttons, and the result fits the description more than the work itself. The description is rarely wrong, but it is almost never complete. The parts of a workflow that matter most are often the parts the people doing the work have stopped noticing. Building software that actually fits requires watching before listening, and listening for what is missing.

I learned that habit in graduate school. I studied anthropology at Edinburgh, where the work involves spending long stretches of time watching people do things they find unremarkable: the routines that have become invisible precisely because they happen every day. The discipline calls this participant observation. The practical lesson is simpler: what people say about their work is usually a tidied-up version of what they actually do. The interesting material is in the difference, and the difference is only visible if you watch.

The other source is practical. For several years I ran a short-term rental operation, with the usual mix of bookings, cleanings, supplies, and the small fires that appear when guests arrive on a Sunday afternoon and something is wrong. My family has run a flower shop in Šibenik for decades, and I work alongside them on the parts that touch software: payments, online orders, and the back-of-house systems that keep the shop running. Both experiences taught me what anthropology pointed toward: in a small business, friction is rarely where people think it is, and the people closest to the work are usually too busy doing it to describe it cleanly.

Most of what I have built since then comes out of those two threads: the watching and the doing. Month-Track is a document workflow tool I built for a Croatian accounting firm. BloomOps is an inventory and operations dashboard for florists, shaped by what I have seen and helped manage in the family shop. Kibitz is a chess analysis tool that pairs engine evaluation with natural-language coaching — different in kind from the others, but built with the same materials. All three are live. The case studies are under Work. The longer essays on how I think about this kind of work are under Writing.