Flypilot · 2015–2026 · Creative technologist
Flypilot
A decade-long collaboration with a first employer turned longtime client — consultant, then emergency contact. The emergencies are technical.
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 tenone 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.