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A retrospective and ongoing journal documenting every significant decision in VERA's development.
VERA now lives at getvera.site. The old GitHub Pages URL redirects automatically — but the address a prospect reads on a pricing page is part of the pitch.
Capacity planning only works if the system knows how each person actually works. VERA was treating your contractors like full-time employees. It no longer does.
A confirmation that nothing happened behind it is worse than no confirmation at all. We fixed the moment where trust breaks.
The morning summary now answers two questions simultaneously: what am I supposed to be working on, and where do my projects stand?
A live dashboard that answers the real questions: which projects are healthy, which are at risk, and what the business earned this month.
The client''s reporting view and the database are separate spreadsheets. The client can never accidentally break the data — and they never have to request a report.
Google Sheets doesn''t enforce its own structure. We had to. The rules we built to keep the data trustworthy.
A sprint is a delivery unit and a revenue recognition unit. Timeliness of logging determines timeliness of revenue — they''re the same thing.
Time off is a cost. If it doesn''t appear in the same system as time worked, the capacity picture is wrong and the P&L is incomplete.
Six weeks in, we stopped and wrote down every decision we''d made. Several of them turned out to be wrong.
Once time tracking is accurate and timely, a layer of project intelligence that was previously impossible becomes straightforward.
Timeliness only works if the system is there when the moment arrives. Getting multi-tenant reliability right was non-negotiable.
Multi-tenancy wasn''t a feature request. It was the point. A tool that feels shared feels like someone else''s.
A name signals a relationship. We weren''t building a utility.
A retainer is a commitment to deliver a volume of work within a period. If you don''t know where you are until the invoice, you''ve already lost.
When data is live and timely, the next question is whether you can go back. We built that in from the start.
When the data is timely and accurate, the financial numbers become real. Real numbers need to reach the right people — and not the wrong ones.
We removed the interface. That meant every piece of information the owner needed had to be captured from a casual Slack message without making that message any harder to send.
Timeliness is the whole product. Any friction that risks the timing is a product failure.
We needed to deploy without adding anything to the client''s stack. Socket Mode and Railway made that possible for almost nothing.
Every time tracking tool ever built starts from the wrong assumption. We found the one thing that fixes it.
The three components we chose on day one — and why each one was chosen specifically because it required no new interface.