Things somebody needed, so I built them.

Watches for lightning near the yard and sets off the site alarm so people get off the equipment, then sounds an all-clear once it's been quiet for half an hour. It's been running continuously for months and has gone off for real.

Our phone system records and transcribes service calls but doesn't keep them long or let you analyse them. This pulls them into a database every night, works out what each call was about and whether it got resolved, and emails managers a weekly summary.

Nobody could answer how quickly we respond to customer quote requests. This reads the inside sales mailboxes, works out which email threads are quote requests, and measures response time in working hours rather than clock hours.

Driver reports come in as helpdesk tickets, often missing the unit number or mileage. This looks up the truck, writes a clean summary a service writer can act on, and puts anything it can't identify into a queue instead of letting it get lost.

Vendors send quotes as PDFs and someone had to retype every line into our system with the right markup applied. This reads the quote, matches the parts, applies the markup, and asks the operator when a match is genuinely ambiguous rather than guessing.

Tracks company laptops and equipment — who has what, where it is, when the warranty runs out, and the history on each one. Scan the barcode on an asset and its record opens.

Monthly reports per truck from our GPS tracking — miles, hours, how much time it spent at the yard, fault codes and safety events, with charts showing the trend. Used to answer whether a truck is being used the way it was meant to be.

Pulls the week's email, groups it into conversations, and produces a summary split into what got resolved, what's still open, and what's worth knowing about — with owners and next steps, as a formatted PDF.

A chat window where a manager asks a question in plain English — "how many parts calls didn't get resolved on the phone last week?" — and gets an answer pulled from the call archive, showing what it looked at to get there.

Watches the network folder where our system drops service request PDFs, reads each one as it lands, looks up the truck, and puts it on a dashboard. Works well; ended up overlapping with Fleetdesk so it never got rolled out.

Opens the yard gates from a phone or on a schedule, driving the relay hardware directly and checking back that the relay actually fired before saying it worked. Also reads the solar setup powering the gate.

Every customer site on a map with the machines they run — and the rock underneath, since that's what determines what a screen at that site is actually processing.

Visitors scan a QR code at the entrance, sign the safety waiver on their phone, and get checked in — so there's an accurate list of who's on site if there's ever an emergency. Finished and set up on a server, never actually switched on.

A small app that checks Outlook every half hour and surfaces only the threads that need you — escalations, things waiting on your decision, anything nobody has answered in two days.

Live video from a technician's phone to an engineer back at the shop, so somebody experienced can look at a machine without a second truck going out. Got it working in the browser over a few days, then stopped before the phone app was finished.