// field notes from the workshop
My name is Ernie. I'm a working bookkeeper and systems builder who documents what I'm actually building, learning, and really screwing up — in public, with zero smart people talk. Witness me break shit on purpose in real time, then laugh yourself hoarse as you watch me try to put it back together without pitching a hissy fit.
Not a blog. Not a brand platform. More like a public notebook for a working adult who builds things, breaks things, and writes it down.
Short captures: what I'm building, testing, noticing, or learning. Posted when it's useful, not on a content schedule.
Practical notes on named projects — Ed, Diane, Kwisatz, and others — stripped of client info but honest about the process.
How a working adult uses technology without turning life into a content machine. Honest takes. No hype, no doom, no influencer energy.
Where the paper-and-code philosophy lives. How things break, how to fix them, and why documentation isn't optional.
// recent captures
Real build notes from the last two work sessions. Repo cleanup, project splits, and the first pass at this workshop site.
Stood up the PRNG Creative repo as the public design-system and workshop home: brand tokens, component examples, UI kits, and the first real notebook cleanup.
Learned the hard way that the parent projects folder should not be its own Git repo when each project folder needs clean, separate history. Moved the accidental parent .git aside.
Connected Project Diane to GitHub after resolving the remote readme conflict. Kept the real local README, merged the unrelated starter history, and got main clean.
Initialized Project Ed safely by writing the ignore rules first, keeping secret-bearing test/config files out of Git, then committing only the local caller docs and safe starter files.
Split public bookkeeping web work from client-facing pages: prng_books stays clean and public, while quotes, estimates, and report links move into a separate client repo.
// active build log
Named projects across automation, tools, and systems work. All grounded in industries I've actually worked in.
Make.com automation pipeline for trucking ticket processing and invoicing. Solving real billing chaos in a real industry. API-first design.
Personal AI assistant and wrangler — connected to everything, knows what I should be doing, designed to run my work life. A system, not a chatbot.
Umbrella for small utility tools built from real workflow pain. AntiHub lives here. More under development.
Utility software under Project Kwisatz. Not currently the main focus but not dead — will be revisited.
// github shelf
The public-facing code shelf: experiments, utility builds, site work, and systems that escaped the notebook long enough to get a commit history.
website · design system
Punk Rock Nerd Girl creative website and the PRNG design-system playground.
trucking · automation
Project Diane: trucking ticketing, OCR, and invoicing pipeline work.
utility · qbo
Kwisatz utility code for QBO receipt search and workflow cleanup experiments.
assistant · systems
Personal assistant infrastructure for wrangling work, notes, and operational chaos.
// the human behind this
I’ve spent enough years inside small business disasters — blown-up bank feeds, mangled A/R, payroll written on the back of a grease-smeared scale ticket — that I stopped complaining and started building tools to fix the exact problems I’d already survived.
Gen-X is officially old now. Hooray. We are thrilled. But, we’ve put enough time in various fields to know where all the bodies are buried. Our entire lives, Gen-X have spent significant time and energy trying to figure out how to get shit done so we can do... nothing. Any shortcut that buys back actual fuck-off-able hours, we will find it.
I still write on actual paper. With actual pens. Sometimes even in cursive, on sticky notes I lose and spend twenty minutes on the floor searching for until my knees and back hurt and I need to lie down. But I also watched my dad build Frankenstein computers out of swap meet parts and sheer stubbornness. Not pretty. Completely functional. To eight-year-old me — pure magic.
So, come watch an old dog learn new — you know, I’ve never liked that saying. Come or don’t. I don’t give two turtle shits. I’ll just be here doing cool shit. If you want to not be lame, by all means, pull up a chair. If you want to continue being lame, that’s your choice. There’s the door. Tell your mom I said, “hi.” Peace.