Systems that run every day

The problem

Quality control lived on clipboards. Progress was guessed at from a spreadsheet somebody updated when they got a chance, non-conformances were logged on paper and easily lost, and proving compliance afterwards meant hunting through folders.

What was built

• Tablet sign-off across 25+ manufacturing stages, used on the floor
• Mandatory hold points — a unit cannot advance until its stage is signed off
• Live weighted production tracking, so progress reflects real effort
• Photo capture at each stage, attached to the unit's record
• Drawing and document management against each build
• Role-based access, so operators, QC and management each see their own view
• One-click PDF compliance export for the finished unit

Result

Quality evidence is captured as the work happens rather than reconstructed afterwards, and the compliance pack for a finished unit is a download instead of a day's work.

The problem

Off-the-shelf CRMs charge per user per month for a feature set most small businesses never touch, while missing the handful of things they genuinely need.

What was built

• Client records with full history in one place
• Inventory tracking wired into the same system
• Day-to-day operational workflow rather than a generic sales pipeline
• Runs in the browser on any device, no per-seat licence

Result

A system that matches how the business actually works, owned outright, with no monthly bill that grows every time someone joins.

The problem

Agencies end up dependent on portals and outside developers for something as routine as adding a house. Every change costs time, money, or both.

What was built

• Property search and filtering that buyers actually use
• Individual listing pages built for search engines
• Staff dashboard for adding and editing listings and photos — no technical knowledge needed
• Valuation lead capture, feeding straight to the office

Result

Listings go live when the office decides, not when a developer is available, and the site earns its own search traffic instead of renting it.

The problem

Rebuilding a shop is the easy part. Doing it without losing years of accumulated search rankings is what separates a successful migration from an expensive lesson.

What was built

• Full online shop with cart, checkout and payment integration
• Quote and invoice request flow alongside standard checkout
• Staff admin panel for products and site content
• Careful URL mapping and redirects so existing rankings carried over

Result

A modern shop the staff can run themselves, launched without the traffic drop that usually follows a rebuild.

The problem

Clients need to see work before it goes live, but half-finished sites left open get indexed by Google, shared around, and cause confusion.

What was built

• Per-client preview environments behind access control
• Blocked from search engines and unlisted to the public
• Review and feedback happens on the real thing, not screenshots

Result

Clients see exactly what they're getting, sign off with confidence, and nothing leaks before launch day.

Why it exists

Built to solve a personal itch, and useful as a demonstration of API integration and database design that scales as the data model grows.

What it does

• Unified tracking across films, TV and games
• Third-party API integration for artwork, metadata and release information
• Database designed to extend to new media types without rework

Why it matters to a client

The same techniques — pulling data from external services and modelling it properly — are what makes a business system genuinely useful rather than another place to retype information.

What it does

• Pulls hundreds of stories daily across dozens of categories
• AI-generated summaries so the point is clear without the click
• Text-to-speech audio briefings for listening rather than reading
• Custom feed management — follow exactly what matters

Why it matters to a business

The same architecture powers competitor monitoring, industry watch lists and internal briefings — anything where somebody is currently reading fifty sources by hand.

A small version of this runs on this very site, feeding the tech news and gaming news pages.

The problem

Commercial cloud storage means a monthly fee that grows with your data, and business files living on somebody else's servers under somebody else's terms.

What was built

• Self-hosted storage with cross-device sync
• Secure, expiring share links instead of email attachments
• Data stays on infrastructure you control

Why it matters to a business

For firms handling client data, where it physically lives is increasingly a question worth being able to answer precisely.

What it is

Research prototypes exploring automated strategy execution — and, more importantly, the controls that stop an automated system doing damage when something unexpected happens.

• Strategy execution across crypto and traditional markets
• Risk controls and hard limits built in from the start
• Fail-safe behaviour when data or connectivity goes wrong

Why it matters to a business

Any system that acts on its own needs the same discipline. The interesting engineering is rarely the happy path — it's what happens when things break.

Listed as engineering work. Fentech does not offer financial or investment advice.

What runs on it

• Reverse proxying and containerisation across dozens of services
• Automated, encrypted off-site backups
• Uptime and performance monitoring with alerting
• Secure remote access without exposing services to the open internet
• Network-wide ad and tracker blocking

Why it matters to a business

This is the same discipline applied to client servers: everything containerised so it can be moved or rebuilt, backups that are tested rather than assumed, and monitoring that tells you before the customer does.

What it does

• Agents handling monitoring, reporting and content generation
• Operational tasks running across multiple business systems
• Multi-provider failover, so one service going down doesn't stop the work

Why it matters to a business

Most "AI automation" falls over the first time an API has a bad day. Building for failure from the start is the difference between a demo and something you can actually depend on. The weekly blog drafts on this site come from exactly this kind of automation.

The approach

No heavyweight framework, no plugin sprawl, nothing loaded that the page doesn't need. The result is a site that loads fast on a rural connection and doesn't degrade as plugins age.

• Multi-language support where the audience needs it
• Live chat and quote calculators built in
• Analytics without slowing the page down
• Optimised for search performance from the first line of code

Result

Sites that stay fast years later, because there's nothing in them that rots. This site is built the same way.

The problem

Planning applications are public, but they sit across 31 separate council portals. A solar installer wanting tomorrow's leads has to run 31 searches a day, by hand, forever. Most simply don't — so the work goes to whoever hears first.

What was built

• Daily automated scrape of all 31 county planning portals, consolidated into one dashboard
• Smart refresh three times a day for paid tiers — 08:00, 12:00 and 17:00
• Filtering by county, application type, status, date range and free-text keyword
• Email alerts the moment a matching application appears
• Built-in lead CRM: New → Contacted → Quoted → Won → Lost, with private notes
• CSV export to Excel or an existing CRM, plus a REST API on the Agency tier
• Stripe billing, free tier, self-serve signup

Result

Hours of manual searching become about sixty seconds of reviewing. Free to start, €9/month Pro, €29/month Agency — a live, running product with paying subscribers.

The problem

The established signature platforms charge €60–€99 per seat per year and host your staff data outside Europe. For an Irish business with GDPR obligations that's an awkward combination of expensive and hard to justify.

What was built

• 30+ templates, tested across Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail and Thunderbird
• Gmail API push and a native Outlook add-in — signatures update everywhere at once
• Chrome extension that injects the signature into every compose window
• Click analytics on every link, so you can see what's actually working
• Scheduled banners that swap themselves between set dates
• QR codes rendered so they survive every email client
• EU-hosted with no third-party trackers — GDPR by default, not as an add-on
• Self-hosted edition: one Docker command, unlimited users, one-time licence

Result

€15/year personal against €60–€99 elsewhere, €8/seat/month for teams, or €199 once to run it on your own server. Live, with a free tier and self-serve signup.

Why it exists

In May 2026 an international consensus published in The Lancet renamed PCOS to PMOS — polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome — to reflect that it is a whole-body endocrine and metabolic condition, not just an ovarian one. Cycle-tracking apps haven't caught up: they're built around fertility, and the metabolic, hormonal and mood symptoms that actually matter to PMOS are either missing or buried. Meanwhile the single most useful thing at a consultation is a clear, dated record of symptoms over months.

What is being built

• Symptom tracking designed around PMOS specifically — endocrine, metabolic, cycle and mood together
• Patterns surfaced over months rather than a single cycle
• Clear summaries a patient can bring to an appointment
• Both names recognised throughout the three-year PCOS→PMOS transition
• Private by design — health data handled with the care it deserves

A tracking and record-keeping tool. Not a medical device, and not a substitute for clinical advice.

The brief

Bring an existing site up to date without losing what already worked — the established content, the search rankings, and the familiarity for returning visitors.

What was done

• Refreshed design, brought in line with current expectations on mobile
• Performance work so pages load quickly on any connection
• Structure and metadata tidied for search
• Existing URLs preserved, so nothing that ranked was thrown away

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