Ten years with the same studio, across every stack it has shipped — trust renewed one incident at a time.
Context
Flypilot is a web and app development agency whose work spans real
estate, hospitality, music, events, and fitness — dozens of client
sites, each with its own stack, feed, and deadline.
Mandate
There was never a single brief. Flypilot was my first job out of grad
school, and the engagement has kept renewing for a decade — as staff,
then consultant, then the emergency
contact. (my contact card in their phone might as well just say “call if broken.” — JJ) Agency work compounds: every
site that launches becomes a site someone has to keep alive. Ten
years in, I’m the someone.
What he built
Not one build — a rolling portfolio of them. Marketing sites and web
products across WordPress, Sanity, React, Rails, and WooCommerce,
built new or inherited mid-flight, for clients in real estate,
culture, and commerce.
- New builds and rebuilds. Homepages recreated in Gutenberg with
custom block libraries, a headless CMS migrated across major
versions with minimal disruption, front ends moved between hosts,
and one full hosting takeover — Rails, Heroku, S3, CloudFront —
absorbed without the client feeling the seams.
- The lead-routing plumbing. Real-estate marketing runs on
attribution, so form submissions fan out to three CRMs at once —
Formspree, Nestio, Spark — each wanting the same lead in a
different shape, with UTM and call-tracking capture stitched
through, spam controls, and dedup that holds under a
double-click. (there is a spreadsheet that knows exactly which ad you clicked. i built it. — JJ)
- The emergencies. A decade of production incidents on live
client sites — content that vanished after a CMS migration, hourly
duplicate emails firing at months-old orders, critical errors
taking sites down, WordPress queries silently truncating results at
ten (one ticket just said “magical vanishing data.” it was accurate.) — found, fixed, and written
down so the next one is smaller.
Outcome
The outcome is the tenure. Ten years, dozens of client sites launched
and kept alive, and an engagement that has outlasted every stack it
started on — still the first call when production goes sideways.
Proof
WordPress · Sanity · React · Rails · WooCommerce, across a decade of
client work — flypilot.io.