I'm Jack. I run a one-person IT and web practice from a desk in Auckland, occasionally from a fishing hut in the Coromandel.
The work is quiet and the operation is small on purpose. There is no agency, no team, no AE between you and the person doing the work - when you email JD IT., the email goes to me.
For the past decade I've worked across the unglamorous middle of technology - the racks, the migrations, the legacy cron jobs nobody wants to touch.
I came to web development the long way around, through systems administration, and I think it shows. I tend to treat a website the way I'd treat a server: something that should be small, well-documented, easy to take apart, and unexceptional in how it fails.
"The best systems are the ones you don't have to think about. That's the brief, every time."
My approach is functionalist by default and decorative only when the brief explicitly asks for it. I don't use frameworks I can't read all the way through. I don't deploy what I haven't watched run for a week.
I write everything down - for me, and for whoever inherits the project after me, which is occasionally also me, six months later, having forgotten everything.
When I'm not in front of a terminal, I'm usually outside. I keep a 35mm camera in the truck and a small archive of pine plantations, weather stations, and underused boat ramps.
The discipline of editing a roll of film down to the keepers is, I think, the same discipline that makes good software - most of the work is deciding what doesn't need to be there.