Dan Brandt

Your app.
Built right, built fast.

Working prototypes with polish, not just code that runs,
but products people actually enjoy using.

Kansas City, KS · Available for contract work

Book a call

See my work ↓

Days to ship

517

Commits / week

Apps shipped

< 14

Days avg

What I’ve Built

★ CLIENT PROJECT

Bid Tracker

Full-stack bid management, intuitive for users and powerful for admins

6 days

Problem: A contractor was drowning in spreadsheets. bids scattered everywhere, costs untracked, receipt photos lost in text threads.

What I built: Full web app: idea submission, competitive bidding, cost tracking with budget bars, receipt photos via Google Drive, and admin dashboard. Google Sheets + Apps Script backend, manageable from the app UI or the spreadsheet directly.

Shipped in 6 days. In daily use by the client.

Next.jsGoogle Sheets APIGoogle Apps ScriptGoogle DriveVercel

View live app →

For you: This is what I do for clients. Your project gets the same speed and attention.

NinKeys

A modern dual-swipe keyboard for iOS

6 days

Challenge: A beloved iOS keyboard was abandoned years ago, no source code, no documentation, nothing.

What I did: Reverse-engineered the original from ARM binaries. Built a custom C++ prediction engine from scratch. 517 commits, 9,500 lines of production code in one week.

250x faster than v1. 99.5% word accuracy. Features Google Keyboard doesn't have.

SwiftC++Metal GPUiOS

For you: If I can reverse-engineer an abandoned app and beat it in a week, your clearly-scoped project is a sure thing.

HeyClaude

Voice-controlled AI assistant for iOS + Apple Watch

10 days

Challenge: I manage two AI coding agents across two machines. Needed to monitor both and send commands from my wrist.

What I did: Native iOS/watchOS app with voice commands, live terminal streaming, three-way bridge chat, and push notifications.

Full mobile + wearable app with real-time WebSocket streaming.

SwiftUIwatchOSWebSocketDeepgram STTAPNs

For you: Real-time apps, push notifications, voice interfaces, cross-device sync, the features modern products need.

Vault Daemon

AI-powered second brain in Rust

Ongoing

Challenge: My productivity system ran on 11 separate scripts, fragile and impossible to maintain. No intelligent search, no conversation understanding, no self-healing.

What I did: One Rust daemon with a local AI brain: 13 cron timers, 7 file watchers, event-sourced architecture, semantic search across 1,900+ notes, a local Gemma LLM for classification and summarization, and an Omi wearable integration that extracts commitments, insights, and task completions from real conversations.

11 services → 1 process. Understands my day from voice conversations. Auto-completes tasks. Runs 24/7 unattended.

RustSQLiteTokioOllama/GemmaEvent SourcingEmbeddings

For you: APIs, data pipelines, cron jobs, local AI, background workers. I build the backend intelligence that keeps your product running.

About Me

I’m Dan, a product-obsessed developer in Kansas City. I use AI-assisted development to ship at startup speed, but what sets me apart is taste. I do 30+ test-and-fix cycles per session because I obsess over how things feel: the button placement, the loading states, the edge cases your users will hit. Anyone can generate code with AI. I design products people love to use.

Why Me Over a Bigger Agency

🎯

Obsessive UX

I don’t ship “good enough.” I test, tweak, and polish until it feels right. 30+ iteration cycles per session.

⚡

Startup Speed

Working prototype in days, not months. You see real progress daily, no vanishing into a black box for weeks.

🤝

You Talk to Me

No project managers, no ticket queues. Direct line to the person building your product. Feedback loops in hours.

How I Work

Day 1

We talk

30-minute call. I learn your problem. You get a clear scope and timeline before I write a single line of code.

Days 2-7

I build, you watch

Daily updates with working demos you can click. Feedback loops measured in hours, not weeks.

Week 2

You ship

Deployed, documented, yours. Hand it to a full-time team or keep iterating with me.

Tell me what you’re building.

Book a 30-minute call or email me your idea. I reply within 24 hours with a scope and timeline.

Typical projects ship in 1-2 weeks.