Rapidly Built logo
Rapidly Built

Build in the open.
Share what works.

I'm building applications as a craft—software that gives people agency over technology, not the other way around.

Ship real applications
Products with users, constraints, and consequences.
Forge the toolkit
Reusable components pulled from real work, not abstractions.
Share the process
Tradeoffs, failures, and lessons—shared in the open.
Follow along

What is Rapidly Built?

A growing body of work built in public: real applications, the tools extracted from them, and the thinking that connects the two.

Practical — shaped by production apps, not hypotheticals.
Compositional — use a single tool, study an app, or adopt the full suite.
In the open — code, decisions, and tradeoffs are shared.
Guiding principle
Build applications and systems that serve people—not people trained to serve systems.

The Applications coming soon

Follow the progress →

Family

Simple tools for managing life details that don't fit well into existing apps.

  • Joint accounts, bills, and service notifications in a shared inbox
  • Contacts and household records kept up to date in one place
  • Shared financial tracking, planning, and regular check-ins

Community

Ways to stay connected to your local community, without algorithms deciding what matters.

  • Following local news and events that actually matter to you
  • Staying aware of live music, shows, and local venues
  • Keeping a living list of restaurants to try, revisit, or recommend

Skill Building

Systems designed to help you actually get better at something, not just spend time on it.

  • Training recall and memory
  • Tracking progress over time
  • Practicing without distraction or noise

Media

Tools that serve your priorities, not some company's engagement metrics.

  • Watching videos without wasting time or attention
  • Saving time on social media and your favorite sites
  • Reminding you what you learned from podcasts

The Toolkit evolving

Want release notes? →

Visibility & operations

Dashboards and instrumentation so you can understand what your app is doing without guessing.

  • App health checks and runtime diagnostics
  • Background job insight (queues, failures, retries)
  • Request traces and slow endpoints

Admin workflows

The "internal UI" surfaces that every serious app eventually needs.

  • Data browsers that respect app constraints
  • Auditing and change history
  • Safe actions (backfills, replays, exports)

Product leverage

Tools that make iteration faster: experiments, analytics, and feedback loops.

  • Event tracking and funnels
  • User session understanding
  • Feature flags and gradual rollouts

Foundations

The unglamorous essentials that remove friction: auth, deployments, storage, and structure.

  • Opinionated Rails structure for tools
  • Deployment patterns and cost control
  • Data import/export primitives

Follow the journey

If you're curious how modern software is built, and why the choices behind it matter, follow along. You don't need a project in progress—this is a front-row seat to the build.

Email me at dan@rapidlybuilt.com

No spam. One email per month. Unsubscribe anytime.

What you'll get
Concrete progress, not hype
Updates across code, writing, and video—covering what shipped, what broke, what changed, and why.
Early visibility into real tools
Watch components evolve from application code into Rapidly Built tools, long before they’re packaged or polished.
A consistent point of view
A way of building software that increases user agency without accumulating SaaS sprawl.