Most episodes are a real build — an alternative to a tool with a monthly subscription, a small app that solves one specific problem, or a piece of the actual product I'm shipping while working a full-time job. You see the stack, the decisions, the parts that break, and the fix.
No course
No community
No revenue screenshots
Code is free, no email required
Replaces Otter AI Pro · $17/mo
Drop in a meeting recording, get back the one-page brief in the format your director actually reads. Runs locally against Whisper, so nothing leaves the machine.
Stack: Whisper · Claude API · Python
Replaces three separate lookup tools
Checks availability, pricing, and trademark collisions across registrars in one pass. Built in an evening because I got tired of eleven browser tabs.
Stack: Node · Cloudflare Workers · Registrar APIs
The real product · Eight months in
Zero-knowledge file transfer up to 500 GB. The browser encrypts before anything leaves it, the key never touches the server, and the file deletes itself after 48 hours.
Stack: Cloudflare Workers · R2 · D1
Free · Whenever there's something worth sending · Unsubscribe any time
Everything that shows up on the channel, plus the things that never make it into a video.
Reston, VA
The Side Build is about getting more out of AI than most people do, and pointing it at the most obvious target there is: the software you're already paying for every month. A lot of those subscriptions are one weekend and four hundred lines of code away from being yours.
So the episodes are real builds, start to finish. Not a demo that works once on camera — the whole thing, including the twenty minutes where it doesn't work and the decision that finally fixes it. When there's code worth sharing it goes on GitHub, free, no email required.
In between the builds are the skills that make any of it possible: how I actually use Claude Code, where the tools are genuinely good, where they quietly waste your afternoon, and the workflows I run every day. Over time this gets into the business side too — the LLC, the payment infrastructure, the slow unglamorous work of turning a side project into something real.
No revenue screenshots. No course. No community to join. Just the methodology, the artifacts, and an honest account of what actually works.
