This week: payments in the framework, nine brands migrated in an hour, and the start of a video pipeline

Ian — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 22:49:46 +0000

This was a consolidation week. I run a bunch of small products under ITW Creative Works, and for years each one carried its own slightly different website, backend, and config. This week most of that duplication died.

OMEGA, the framework under everything

Most of the week went into OMEGA, the framework I'm building to run every brand: ten minor releases in seven days (0.29 → 0.43).

The headline pieces:

Payments, end to end. Checkout, billing UI, discount handling, and production gating now live in the framework. A brand turns payments on with config, not code.
One analytics contract. Every target (website, backend, desktop, extension) now reports events through a single typed contract. One definition, no per-app drift.
Lifecycle plumbing. A retention dialog, a winback flow, and offline mode, all shipped once and inherited by every brand.

The reason this is cool: fixing something in one product used to mean fixing it in ten places. Now every brand picks it up on its next update.

Nine brands, one template, one hour

The payoff moment. I scaffolded monorepos for nine brands, including StudyMonkey, Giftly, DashQR, Bink, Ghostii, Chatsy, Kirue, Clockii, and the ITW site itself, all from a single brand template, all within the same hour.

Migration was config conversion, not a rewrite: each legacy site and backend got ported onto the framework packages, and its old settings were translated into one omega.json5. The brands with the most legacy baggage took a few extra commits; the clean ones were nearly free.

StreamForge: the start of a video pipeline

New project. I want long working sessions to become edited videos without me living in a timeline editor. This week its first repo, cutroom, got a working recap pipeline: ingest the footage, render a longform cut, then frame shorts out of it with proper edge anchoring. A second repo, switchboard, is seeded and waiting. No public site yet; when the first output is watchable, that will be the post.

The agent workflow engine

My Claude Code workflow tooling (an engine I call workkit) went 0.41 → 0.47: a live board for every project's issues, stale-work alarms, and documentation-density enforcement. The idea it encodes: GitHub issues are the single source of truth, and the agents' job is to keep them true. It manages a small fleet of coding sessions across all the repos above.

Small but satisfying

Dotfiles shipped 3.20.4 and 3.21.0: a Chrome E2E teardown fix and pinning jq so hooks stop resolving to the system build.

Next week: first real output from the video pipeline, and the brand rollout continues. If you have gone through a many-products-one-framework consolidation, I would genuinely like to hear what broke for you. Comments open.

How 'me' became 'us'

Ian — Mon, 11 May 2020 23:51:23 +0000

Hi! I'm Ian and I build apps that help entrepreneurs succeed.

I started programming at age 12 with simple game development using a visual programming language known as MMF2. It taught me the basics but the language is juvenile compared to most others so I eventually graduated to Java where I honed my skills a bit more.

I built nothing of note until I picked up web technologies (JS, HTML, CSS) and eventually Node.js where I began building my first successful project Somiibo: a social media automation platform. Somiibo was launched on November 20th, 2017, and would change everything for me.

The project took off with tens of thousands of signups and a few thousand paying users in just the first few months. I decided it was time to get serious so I started a company called ITW Creative Works to act as the parent company to Somiibo as well as all future projects.

After that, our company began building a diverse set of apps and tools including:

SoundGrail: A toolkit for musicians and DJs
Slapform: A form backend for web developers
Proxifly: A free https proxy API
Socialetto: An influencer search engine and database

I now run the company as my full-time job and manage the development of all of the above projects. At our company, we are constantly innovating and creating new things that make the world a better place and we have so much fun doing it!

Thanks for taking a second to hear my story and I hope we inspire you to build something great too!