About

I'm in Wheatland, Wyoming. It's a small town. I co-own a post-frame manufacturer and a coffee shop, and I build the software and hardware that help run them. I work on it most of the day, and a lot of nights too. I'd rather build a thing than rent it and hope it works.

The operator

Western Building Supply is a post-frame and building-materials manufacturer. We make trusses and structural components and move materials to contractors across eleven western states. Rob runs it as CEO. I run the technology and how the product gets built. There's a crew, a production floor, equipment, customers, and cash-flow pressure. It's a real business, and I'm hands-on with how the line runs and how the product gets finished. I co-own a coffee shop too. It keeps me close to the actual day, not just the numbers.

The builder

I write my own software. I'm building Atlas, a dashboard that puts how the company is running in one place, for the whole team. I build hardware because it's worth building: a Raspberry Pi and a camera over the truss line to count production on their own, an ESP32 radar that tracks the planes overhead. I write my own automation and I run AI through all of it, on purpose, not for show.

The through-line

The two halves are the same habit. I see a problem nobody's dealing with and I build something real to fix it. Not a committee, not a roadmap deck, just the thing, shipped. Under all of it: what gets measured gets done. So I build the thing that measures what matters, and I own it all the way down. That's also why it's hard to copy. A software vendor can't fake running a truss plant, and another shop owner can't fake building Atlas. I'm both.

The pattern

My pattern is build it for myself first, then sell it. I'm building Atlas to run Western. As it proves out, it becomes a product for other shops like mine, the ones with the same blind spots I had. One codebase, set up by the people who use it, not a custom build for every customer. I build with AI to move fast, then I own the stack underneath. It's pre-launch. You can get on the list below.

The proving ground

I try this stuff on my own life before it touches the floor. The 4 Pillar Man tracks the parts of a life I care about the same way Atlas tracks a company. The 29029 tracker is a live data system I built to watch myself climb the height of Everest. Same instinct, lower stakes.

Most of it gets built between running the businesses and late at night. That's just how it goes.

Hilty.